Jean Valentine is the quintessential “poet’s poet.” Since winning the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965, she has published ten collections of poetry to high critical acclaim. Among her distinguished fans is Adrienne Rich, who writes: “Valentine’s poems ask for a kind of reader that I hope is still being born-one whose senses are unblunted by the heave and crackle of bravura writing, of poetic muscle-flexers and weight-lifters.” Spare, intensely-felt, and often fragmentary, Valentine’s cryptic, dreamlike poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. Says Seamus Heaney, “These are poems that only she could write.”