Suzanne Hancock's debut collection of poems seeks to explore seemingly disparate things: family bonds, self deceit, lost desire, and the final days of Descartes' life. With precision and urgent honesty these poems take us from an apple orchard in summer, to a Dutch slaughterhouse, to diving from a train bridge. Yet, there is cohesiveness throughout these pages that can be explained by the author's yearning to discover the world, to be transformed by language and its implications. In Another Name for Bridge, the author attempts to link pieces of the world: experience and memory, one side of the river to the other, the dialogue between natural philosophy and painterly practice. These poems sing the praises of connection, but never seem to forget the vast spaces that cannot be linked.

Suzanne Hancock has taught at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and is the author of Another Name for Bridge. She lives in Montreal.

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There is such power and precision in Ms. Hancock's poems-not a syllable out of place, not a line surplus to requirements, producing a kind of tensile strength by which the most carefully considered choice in words, a language utterly free of adornment or affectation, bears abundant tidings, heavy traffic and rich cargo. Of her several gifts, this Ômetaphoring' is the author's most singular and salutary. A welcome and well-wrought debut by a writer of real substance.Ó (Thomas Lynch, finalist for the National Book Award)