Full Cry

winner of the Stevens Manuscript Competition
sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies
available from Amazon.com

“I enjoy the gentleness of these poems, their precision, their good humor, their sometimes sprightly, sometimes melancholy delicacy. The way they capture the world’s soft moments, the hushed utterances and muted tones that gather in the margins. Their warmth and intimacy, like family letters written in longhand on yellowed, age-crinkled paper and passed down from one generation to the next. Read them slowly, let them unfold at their own pace, in their own time, in your hands, in your inner ear.”

—Troy Jollimore

“It is the meditative, the narrative, the lyric, the range of the possibilities of poetic voice—sometimes within a single poem—that mounts steadily through this collection to rise into the full cry of the title. The phrase suggests fierce pursuit, and Lisa Ampleman is after big game: a Thou for the I, an exploration of human connection in flesh, and spirit, too—most elusive prey, all of it. But she’s a subtle tracker. Without a hint of the overblown—no wail in the cry these poems make—the book gives us the emotion, and the pleasure at its skillful rendering. I admire the way Ampleman triangulates on feeling, so that with two landscapes and a flash of story, say, or two stories and a cityscape, a poem will stake out the emotional truth of a situation, a truth told slant and more powerful for it.”

—Jason Sommer