Book excerpt: This National Book Award–winning volume presents nearly forty years of the renowned poet’s work. Between 1965 and 2003, Jean Valentine published nine critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including Dream Barker(winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), Ordinary Things, and The River at Wolf. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine’s poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems, presenting them alongside a stunning new collection. Valentine’s poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects―love, and death, and the soul. Her images―strange, canny visions of the unknown self―clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.