Description Signs Following explores how the language of poetry can engage with history, temporality, and the fact of embodiment in the physical world of change and difference, while yearning for some transcendent guarantee of meaning. The poems in Signs Following express this tension by pushing their language, occasions, and formal attributes beyond a comfortable clarity in an attempt to discover what meanings and values, if any, can reside on the other side of the work. In the course of these explorations, the poems engage also with the history and limits of the lyric itself, testing the capacity of the sonnet, the villanelle and the ode, among others, to deal with conditions of personal, political and historical extremity. About the Author Ger Killeen's previous books include A Wren, which won the 1989 Bluestem Award for Poetry, and A Stone That Will Leap Over The Waves (Trask House Books, 1999). His work has been anthologized in From Here We Speak (Oregon State University Press), On the Counterscarp (Salmon Publishing), and American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie-Mellon University Press). Killeen lives on the Oregon coast and is a professor in the Dept. of English Literature & Writing at Marylhurst University. Free Verse Editions Edited by Jon Thompson Free Verse Editions is a joint venture between Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry & Poetics and Parlor Press. The series publishes collections that dramatize a singular vision of experience, a mastery of craft, a deep knowledge of poetic tradition, and a willingness to take risks. For more information about the annual competition, visit Parlor Press ( http://www.parlorpress.com ) or Free Verse ( http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/ ) on the Web.
