Rich in metaphor, the poems in Lisa Ress's Object Lessons push and pull like the tides, reminding us not to forget what we already know in our bodies: that the bodies of school children sometimes hang like cloaks in the cloak room; that the midwestern horizon is a straight line, a simple minded kid's drawing; that the earth itself is a banquet richly concocted of desire, limitation, murder. Ress articulates a wide range of emotional experiences, gets these experiences into words for us so we can make them our own. -Robert Hellenga