Contest Judge X. J. Kennedy heralds Barbara Lau's The Long Surprise as
"full of unexpectedness . . . feeling and verve" and "a confident step onto
the main stage of American poetry."

    Adds Eleanor Wilner, "Here is a poet of candor, vigor and daylight
vision, who loves without illusion. . . whose ear is unerring, and whose
startlingly fresh images push up like 'wild mint . . . through sidewalks.'"

    Posing questions about the making of art ("Is chaos / counterpoint to art,
or instead, / its tuning fork?"), marriage ("How little is enough?"), faith,
family, and selfhood ("Where does she begin / and I end?"), Lau explores
"how life announces itself" at our uneasy turn of the century.

    Her poems witness both the horrific the loss of a child, the greed of the
impoverished, the motives behind child prostitution and common pleasures
"so dense they sedate you."

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BARBARA LAU currently teaches creative writing, composition, and
literature at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa.