Crab Orchard Series in Poetry—First Book Award Beautiful Trouble Poems by Amy Fleury     September 2004 paper, 0-8093-2598-5, $14.95 64 pages, 6 x 9 Poetry    Copublished with the Crab Orchard Review Jon Tribble, series editor   “Amy Fleury’s Beautiful Trouble sips ‘thimbles of sunshine,’ feeds ‘honey-rimmed on the mouths of men,’ feels ‘the itch of fire,’ and wants ‘a sweet potato baby.’ These are troubles beautiful as plain days distilled to the wonder seed.” —Kim Stafford, author of The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer's Craft   “The minute I finished Beautiful Trouble, I wished I had copies to give to all my friends: To the poets, of course, who will admire it for its art, but also to those who don't read poetry. Fleury proves that a book of poems need not be baffling or condescending or self-absorbed. With ordinary words placed with perfect precision, this book throws open dozens of windows onto fresh new ways of seeing, and loving, the world.” —Ted Kooser, author of Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps    “Like the persona in her poem ‘When the Dancing is Done,’ Amy Fleury’s poems ‘whirl and wheel’ in a mesmerizing joyful abandon of assonance and alliteration. These are tender poems full of harsh beauty and compassion giving the reader a world both ‘blighted and blessed,’ where there is ‘trouble all around and everywhere little mercies.’ Fleury is a ‘pilgrim from the plains’ sailing into the ‘beautiful trouble/ of this world,’ bringing with her a rare and magical sensibility, a lyric intensity that is nearly hypnotic and wondrous love of the sheer beauty and joy of language.” —Judy Jordan, author of Carolina Ghost Woods     In her first collection of poems, Kansas native Amy Fleury captures images of dragging clotheslines, baked lawns, and sweet potato babies, inserting them with an earnest dignity into her stories of midwestern life. Beautiful Trouble explores the subtleties of landscape, place, families, girlhood, womanhood, and everyday existence on the prairie. Fleury writes of the Midwest with authenticity, speaks of romance with delicate allure, and recalls the heartbreak of childhood without self-pity. In meditations on resilience and life’s contradictions, Fleury engages her characters fully and paints their souls and sensations evenly in language both rare and beautiful. She is a poet in love with sound and its power to summon majesty from quotidian scenes. Her poems are brief and striking, depending on exquisite word choice and balance to achieve a simple order on the page.     At Twenty-Eight   It seems I get by on more luck than sense, not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood, breath on dice or pennies found in the mud. I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance. At turns, charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude she counts as daylight virtue and muted evenings, the inventory of absence. But this is no sorry spinster story, just the way days string together a life. Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan. Sometimes I don’t care if I will marry. I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights, singing like only a lucky girl can.     A native of rural northeast Kansas, Amy Fleury earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and has held the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, 21st, Laurel Review, South Dakota Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is an associate professor of English at Washburn University and the managing editor of Woodley Memorial Press in Topeka, Kansas.    Available through booksellers everywhere or  directly from Southern Illinois University Press