A spectacle of intimate virtuosity, the movements of Nervous Pastoral . From arresting and unsettling sensuality ("Dulcino, it said/ this won't hurt.//I think it did. [. . .] And lit with camphor, I was/ branches.") through equally intense moments touched with the barest, and one senses, fully appropriate, hint of bitterness: "Treason of tendon, unholding/ my house// together. Untethering/ my body." Where another poet might refer to science or philosophy or alchemy, Snediker lifts material from these realms and animates it through play, equal parts sharp and tender, on words as touchstones for worlds of meaning: dendrite, noble, withies. This is the kind of poetry -- uncompromising, gorgeous, and absolute in its precision -- we name as lapidary.

Perfect-bound with full-color cover, 43 pages.
Set in Palatino Linotype with Vivaldi ornaments. Limited edition
of 750 copies.

$6, S&H included.

Part of an ongoing collaboration with photographer Marius Lehene, whose work is featured on the cover, Still: (to be) Perpetual forms a sequence of interrupted sequences: lists that aren't, narratives torqued back on themselves or missing pieces, arguments and hopes that test the words in which they're offered. By turns sharply topical and then gentle, lush, intrigued by smallness, these poems strike harmony at the impossible nexus of genuine wit and the genuinely humane. Noah Eli Gordon calls Still "a gem of a chapbook," and indeed, it glints, it cuts and beguiles.

Perfect-bound with full-color cover, 29 pages.
Set in Calisto MT with Century Gothic italic
titling. Limited edition of 750 copies.

$6, S&H included.

Beautiful and beautifully troubling, Laura Mullen's TURN, dove|tail's first publication, works through counterpoint, each piece divided in halves that complicate one another. Taking as its points of departure the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr. near Jasper, Texas (a photo from the crime scene appears on the cover), energized poetics a la Charles Olson, and a fearless excavaton of the language of self, self-perception, and body, TURN offers at one point a "late frozen parable             caught inside loss," at another the "wreckage of cages and their parrot / picture," and, in the stuttering glow of a movie projector, "illuminated / skin / where nothing is hidden." The poems ache and astonish from every page.

Perfect-bound with full-color cover, 25 pages.
Set in Perpetua and Arial Black. Limited edition
of 750 copies.

$6, S&H included.