Little Terrarium

Book excerpt: Hannah Fries, former poetry editor of Orion, has worked with some of the nation's top poets, both in her graduate program at Warren Wilson, and as an editor. It shows in the confident, lyric voice of her debut volume, Little Terrarium. Her range, from giving human unsentimental voice to biblical women -- Mary, Noah's wife, a girl raised from the dead by Jesus -- to capturing Winslow Homer in words in a series devoted to his paintings, to attentive, fresh, surprising looks at our contemporary world, Fries doesn't shy away from what is emotionally true, but manages to do so in her own unique way. We're proud to offer these poems as our next publication.A mind and a mind's eye for art are evident on every page of this fine book. Beyond the beautiful, however, these poems also register a sharp regard for the natural world, for our hands-on knowledge of it, and for the plain fact that we are alive at a time when the natural world is most threatened. That is a practical predicament, but it is also a moral reality. To face the practical is a matter of will; to embrace the moral, as this book makes clear, is a matter of love. The love on these pages is human and searching--such is the love we need for art and the love we seek for wisdom." -- Maurice Manning