Poetry. Donald Morrill's new collection, WITH YOUR BACK TO HALF THE DAY, circles unexpected, compelling questions, intent on transporting their full measure to the reader (as if it might be revealed only in that company). Avid to understand how we get human every day, Morrill's poems meet Basho's challenge not to follow the footsteps of the old poets but to seek whatthey sought. This book rushes and retreats, feints and decides, tests and welcomes, and always branches. Distance joins things, Morrill writes, and, indeed, he is a poet of broad contact. The result is a volume laden with rambunctious splendors and meticulous reflections brought forth in Morrill's own hard-earned voicemusical, witty, perceptive, affecting.

Donald Morrill was born in Des Moines, Iowa. He has served as a foreign expert at Jilin University, Peoples Republic of China, and as a Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Lodz, Poland. Recently, he was the Bedell Visiting Writer in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is the author of two collections of poetry, At the Bottom of the Sky, winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry, and With Your Back to Half the Day, and three previous books of nonfiction, The Untouched Minutes, Sounding for Cool, and A Stranger's Neighborhood. For many years, he directed the Writers at the University series at the University of Tampa, and has been a poetry editor of Tampa Review and the University of Tampa Press Poetry Series. His is currently Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Tampa.