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Recital Samn Stockwell 1-932418-08-03 $13.00 ©2004 order this title       Samn Stockwell lives with Jackie Rae Johnson in Marshfield, Vermont, and works in Montpelier, Vermont. Her first book, Theater of Animals, was a winner in the 1995 National Poetry Series and was published by the University of Illinois Press. Her poems have appeared in the anthology Gods and Mortals (Oxford University Press) and in many magazines and journals.           In Recital, Samn Stockwell sings the magnificent burdens of a physical life. Here, the weight of human bodies, of all bodies, really, becomes the sub/stance of a new sound. And the sound is warm. The sound is tender. —Donald Revell     In "The Idiot Prince," Samn Stockwell presents us a figure who "Each year…learns goodbye/and forgets it like the recipe for an intricate dish." Throughout the collection we all become such idiots, being reminded of the intricate recipes we always knew, but had forgotten. For such reminding, we must be grateful, and are, and are better people and readers. This book is full of grandeur, small-scale but the more necessary for it. —Bin Ramke

Lyric leaps toward narrative in Samn Stockwell's Recital as elegy, dramatic monologue, and narrative revolve around the developing character of Fleck. Strangers come and go, and Lila, the speaker's friend, love, most-desired audience, is always, lamentably, just out of range. Poem as snapshot, poem as flash of sympathetic eavesdropping; poem as sketch: this sequence makes abundance of experiential shards, the "combustible slivers in our pockets." —Sarah Kennedy