The work in this issue of NDR is from the final section of my second book of poems, The Finger Bone, which will be published in January by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Most of the poems in that part of the book—whether they are called "For the Dead" or not—are, in one way or another, about death, ghosts, and absence. My friends who have read the manuscript call it spooky. "But spooky in a good way," they tell me. I can't say I set out to write spooky poems, but there you are.

I've provided a few of the others that have recently appeared in different journals.

I live in rural Missouri, where I edit Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing (find it on the web at http://www.cmsu.edu/englphil/pleiades.html) and teach. My anthology, The New Young American Poets, appeared to weird and wildly varying reviews last year.