Winner of the 1999 Richard Snyder Publication Prize, this accomplished second book of poems combines the grit and detail of a sensibility shaped first in a Brooklyn childhood, then honed in travel throughout the world. There is a sort of contrapuntal movement between the content and music of this collection--the grit and detail of lived experience lifted and undercut through the subtle elegance of rhymed and unrhymed pentameter. "These poems get around: from Brooklyn to Belfast; from Italy to Africa; from Youngstown, Ohio, to. a hospital in Marin, where the poet's mother is dying.. Brady's voice is zany, rough and heartbreaking and Weal is full of wild surprises"-- Maggie Anderson. Philip Brady teaches at Youngstown State University, and lives in Youngstown, OH. He is the winner of three Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and of many residencies at art centers throughout Europe.

About the author: Philip Brady is a professor of English at Youngstown State University, where he directs the Poetry Center and Etruscan Press. He is the author of three books of poetry, Weal (winner of Ashland Poetry Press's Snyder Prize); Forged Correspondences, (chosen for Ploughshares' Editors' Shelf by Maxine Kumin); and Fathom; and a memoir, To Prove My Blood: A Memoir of Emigrations & the Afterlife. He is the co-editor, with James F. Carens, of Critical Essays on James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He plays in Brady's Leap, a New-Celtic band which has produced two CDs of original music.