Beauties on Mad River

Beauties on Mad River collects together fifteen years of poetry that has appeared in three Signal The Fabulous Disguise of Ourselves, South of the Tudo Bem Café (1990), and What Dante Did With Loss (1994). This is poetry that, in the words of George Elliot Clarke, "maps not so much the world as the soul." Almost half the poems in this volume are new - many of the 'keystone' poems inspired by the spirit of the eastern lyric form, the ghazal. "Through the medium of the keystone poems," Conn states, "I perceive more clearly now, and in ways that I did not previously, the themes of individual earlier pieces... These 'plateau' pieces have functioned for me as true keystones, as revelatory glimpses back into my work of the last fifteen years."