A new collection of provocative work from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous, and intellectually charged work. In her tenth collection, Spell, Lauterbach activates the many meanings of "spell": her sense that the world is under a spell from which it must awaken, to spells of passing weather, to her desire to spell out life's difficulties and wonders, and how sin-gle words (and their etymologies) might inform and enlighten our contemporary condition. In short poems, poem sequences, and a series of "Conversations with Evening," Lauterbach calls upon all her imaginative resources to locate a new hybrid poetics of reality, with wit, urgency, and candor. Praise for Ann Lauterbach’s most recent collection, Under the Sign:

“For almost four decades, Lauterbach has kept asking, in poem after allusive poem, how wisdom arrives, how senses make sense, how art matters and happens—and what love, and loss, have to do with it . . . her poems ‘make nothing happen,’ except a way to think hard—and to hold out hope for thought to occur.” —Boston Review

“As a poet, Lauterbach is nothing if not versatile in content and form. . . . Her register is resolutely multivalent. . . . She challenges and enchants.” —The Rumpus

“Enacting insight, intuition, elegance, and humor, these poems are, in a phrase coined by fellow individualist Frederick Seidel, ‘daggers that sing.’” —Rain Taxi