New books from the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry now available from SIU Press

Heavenly Bodies, by Cynthia Huntington

"This is a poetry of woundedness and defiance. Heavenly Bodies has a stark integrity in its refusals to beguile or comfort; no one could call it uplifting. Yet there is something bracing, even encouraging, in the hungry survival of this sister of Sylvia Plath and in her self-insistence: I do not give up my strangeness for anyone. "—Mark Halliday

"Cynthia Huntington’s Heavenly Bodies is the most searing and frightening book of poetry I have read in years. The poems arise from pain and illness, from the body’s rebellions and betrayals, and yet they are also curiously exhilarating, even redemptive: perhaps because they are utterly free of self-pity, and find the means—through the sustained ferocity and invention of their language—to transform suffering into a vision so bold it must be called prophetic. Heavenly Bodies is a remarkable collection, on every level."—David Wojahn, author of World Tree


Cynthia Huntington is the author of four books of poetry, including The Radiant (winner of the Levis Prize), The Fish-Wife, and We Have Gone to the Beach, as well as a prose memoir, The Salt House. A former New Hampshire State Poet Laureate, she is professor of English at Dartmouth College where she serves as senior faculty in creative writing. She served as Chair of the Poetry Jury for the Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry for 2006.


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Lacemakers, by Claire McQuerry

“The poems of Lacemakers have much in common with the experience of gliding she describes so vividly in one poem—all lightness and delicacy and daring. At the same time, their urgently associative cinematography moves and accrues until with the poet we feel equally sized to the sky and fastened to the particular and exquisite life of things. Lifted on the page by an impeccable ear and her careful, unflinching eye for the arresting metaphor, these graceful lyrics manifest a twenty-first-century pilgrim’s desire to dwell in the space between the gravities of place and the lure of the placeless, between bodily desire and the clarity of the bodiless, between the ties of Earth and those of an elusive Heaven.” —Daniel Tobin, author of Belated Heavens

"Bearing both the loving attention and the estimable skill of the lacemaker, Claire McQuerry attends to the abundant, often perplexing threads that comprise the apparent world, intent on making of that abundance something that serves. Hers is a craft that makes apprehensible that 'sweetness of all things beyond reach.'"—Scott Cairns, author of Compass of Affection

Claire McQuerry is a creative writing fellow at the University of Missouri-Columbia and an editor for The Missouri Review. She was a 2011 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prizewinner and a finalist for the Olive B. O'Connor fellowship in creative writing. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Louisville Review, The Los Angeles Review, Western Humanities Review, Creative Nonfiction, and other journals.