Wake Wake Wake

Author: Valerie Nieman

Publisher: Press 53
5 x 8 Paperback, Perfect Bound
100 pages
ISBN: 0-9772283-5-5
$14.00 postage paid

This first full-length collection of poetry by award-winning poet Valerie Nieman includes work that first appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Blackbird and numerous other journals and anthologies.

National Book Award finalist Sarah Lindsay says, "Valerie Nieman writes poems with long tap roots, and poems with sharp beaks that strike swiftly. They cast off from the known, or fix the familiar with a clear gaze, and unmoor the reader either way. For a nameless hunger and restlessness, here are guide and supplies and hills to climb, all in one fine book."

Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina, offers the following: "Like the millwright in her poem, Valerie Nieman seems "with bare hands (to) embrace live steam." Wake Wake Wake is sinew and tendon, hard muscle and bruised bone; the volume sings with every inch of the body and every breath of the spirit. If she speaks of "hearing that we have all fallen short," she yet believes -- she knows -- "the way a path is best walked/not by looking down/but by looking out." Would you be stout of heart, steadfast of purpose? Read Valerie Nieman."

Valerie Nieman is the author of a recent collection of short fiction, Fidelities, from West Virginia University Press, as well as two novels and two chapbooks of poetry. Her poems and short stories have been widely published in journals such as Poetry, The Kenyon Review, 5 A.M., and West Branch, as well as several anthologies, including the forthcoming issue from Kakalak. Awards have included a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1998 and 2002 Elizabeth Simpson Smith prizes in fiction from the Charlotte Writers Club and the Greg Grummer Prize in poetry from Phoebe. Ms. Nieman is a 1978 graduate of West Virginia University and received an M.F.A. in creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. A longtime newspaper reporter and editor, she is now a professor of English and journalism at N.C. A&T State University in Greensboro.