Jim Dodge said he would consider publishing a volume of poetry if he lived to the millennium. Happily he did, and Rain on the River is the immediate result - work selected from his Tangram chapbooks, broadsides, and Solstice pieces, accompanied by three dozen new poems.

If you've enjoyed his fiction, Dodge's first collection of poems and short prose offer similar pleasures: a splendid ear for language, great emotional range and subtlety, a sharp eye for the illuminating detail, and a sensibility that encompasses outright hilarity, savage wit, and tender marvel - all made eminently accessible through writing of uncompromising clarity and grace.