Kathleen Peirce is the author of three previous collections: Mercy (University of Pittsburgh Press), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Prize, Divided Touch, Divided Color (Windhover Press), and The Oval Hour (University of Iowa Press), which won the Iowa Prize and the William Carlos WIlliams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She teaches at Texas State University.

About The Ardors:

"In Peirce's The Ardors, the pearl slapdash of an obsession with a single word and all the formal devices, the broken arguments of sonnet and ode, somehow become immediately soluble in an almost painful dailiness of life. It's as if it's a lovely morning, in all our worlds. Maybe a medieval world, with cats and mice, but without the self-conscious flotsam and jetsam of a bad fat boat like the Musee des Beaux Arts. You know, some precious ark of things seen! The arguments in the more formal of these poems are nearly Miltonic—I refer now to the darkness of a world quarreling with its light and, in balance, the light of that same world quarreling with its darkness, that cold, cold envoy."
—Norman Dubie

"Startling in their mystery, these poems are entirely original: abstract and passionate, sensual and otherworldly, trance-like and exciting. They are told through a 'we,' perhaps all of us human beings, remembering; yet strangely, too, each of us experiencing everything alone. The Ardors is a book that takes us beyond ourselves, beyond our workaday bodies and souls."
—Jean Valentine