Book excerpt: How is it that Betsy Wheeler makes me feel both accompanied by and accompaniment to her seductive, disarming, and lushly inventive poems? "Everything is what we need," she writes in Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room. And in this dream, everything is what we get. Such intensity, richness, humor, and unabashed innocence in these poems. I love their lyricism, their playfulness with the poetic conventions of you and I, and the joy they take in making music. An auspicious and captivating debut! -Kathy Fagan In many of the poems of this confident and moving first collection, the speaker is either falling asleep or waking. This is because she deeply desires and hopes for change: a new life, full of love, compassion, imagination, and awareness. "Something this good, this beyond/ the realm of possibility/ should be called gleaming." These poems, through their gorgeous, often strange, yet always accessible language, bring us into the necessary struggle - familiar, worrisome, ludicrous, sublime, essential - to wake to live in a more authentic, imaginative, freer realm. -Matthew Zapruder Rare synthetic intelligence, sympathetic imagination, emotional equilibrium, versatility and flexibility, a book conditioned to be open, welcoming, kind and true, a collection carefully shaped, carefully said. These poems say poetry-you don't want to spare poetry, you want to keep a place prepared for it, to entice it to come along, anytime. Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room. Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room. Astonishing. -Dara Wier Betsy Wheeler completed her MFA in poetry at The Ohio State University. From 2005-2007, she held the Stadler Fellowship at Bucknell University. She is Managing Director for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at U-Mass, Amherst and is editor of Pilot Books-a publisher of limited edition poetry chapbooks. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.