Brookline Books/Lumen Editions

Dialogue For The Left and Right Hand 

Steven Cramer's third and most diverse collection of poems to date orchestrates a complex interplay of voices: lyrical, colloquial, mordant; even, at times, enraged. Whether in fixed forms or free verse, these poems have an energy and an architecture all their own. Sometimes narrative, sometimes startlingly associative, Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand is a tour-de-force of craft and passion. 

"Steven Cramer's exacting, orderly poetry is committed to the complicated textures of feeling; this poet has made a sort of pact with emotional life which goes like this: Nothing here will be inflated, everything here will be confronted, and whatever music feeling will yield will be tuned to the heart's true pitch. Thus, full as they are with the difficult stuff of the real, these poems also startle us with their plain and daily beauties. `The sturdiest houses,' he writes, `have this lived-in look.' These poems, likewise, feel lived-in, strong and genuine as houses." —Mark Doty 

"These poems are always morally drawn, surprising and mysterious; reading them, you find yourself `stranded / In a doorway with no door, on a canvas/ Raft swept out to sea. From its wake / You watch your spirit drift closer...'" — Jean Valentine 

"The poems in Steven Cramer's remarkable new book celebrate those privileged, life-sustaining, yet evanescent moments of agreement between self and world, word and thing, one person and another; but they often do so by reminding us of the destructive forces in us and around us that menace or impede those moments. On every page of this beautiful collection, Cramer enacts a mature and compelling sensibility. A luminously wise and memorable book." — Alan Shapiro 

Steven Cramer's previous collections are The Eye That Desires to Look Upward (Galileo Press, 1987) and The World Book (Copper Beech Press, 1992). His poetry and criticism have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and Triquarterly. He has taught at M.I.T., Boston University, and Tufts University, and currently teaches literature and poetry writing at Bennington College.