Poetry. "John Balaban's compelling poems are alive with sensuous experience, his perspicuous language embracing both irony and compassion. A witness to war's savageries and the brutalities of life, this poet yet feels the possibilities of redemption in the natural world, and in the power of poetry: 'Crossing the moonlit fields/stippled bright with human bones,/ Tu Fu wrote that poetry is useless,/ in a poem alive these thousand years'" -Daniel Hoffman.