"Margo Stever listens to every sound, every edge of word that she uses here, so as to 'get said what must be said' in an otherwise brutal world. She is an impeccable poet, and this book proves it absolutely."
—Robert Creeley


"Unfolding in a series of surprising metaphors and startling linkages, [Margo Stever's] lyrics move us from the ordinary into a realm of imagination and language whose only name is poetry."
—Billy Collins

Margo Stever’s articles and book reviews have appeared in the Connecticut Review, Minnesota Review, Rain Taxi Review, Home Planet News, New Delta Review, Calyx, and Poets & Writers. Her collection of poetry, Frozen Spring (2002), was the winner of the Mid-List Press First Series Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, Reading the Night Sky, won the 1996 Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition. For the last several years, she has worked to create a photography exhibition, “Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 Mission to Asia, The Photographs of Harry Fowler Woods. Her poems have appeared in the Webster Review, New England Review, Connecticut Review, Poet Lore, West Branch, Seattle Review, Rattapallax, and elsewhere. She has edited Imperiled Landscapes, Endangered Legends, Rizzoli International Publications (1997) and Voices from the River, Slapering Hol Press, (1990). Her poems have also appeared in numerous anthologies including Dire Elegies (Foothills Press, 2006); Chance of a Ghost (Helicon Nine Publications, 2005); and The Breath of Parted Lips, Volume II, (KavanKerry Press, 2004). She is the founder and current Board Member of The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center and the founding editor of the Slapering Hol Press.

Margo Stever: "My recent work continues my investigation of universal and some less considered sub-themes within the general framework of loss and survival, which are also apparent in my first published full-length collection of poems, Frozen Spring. I am drawn to elegy as an artistic form in which I have explored how experiencing loss, whether personal or cultural, can bring us to a higher level of understanding. My work generally deals with topics such as the death of a parent, alcohol addiction, adolescent struggles, or the end of the life of a creative person."

"My poems look for meaning in the circumstances they describe, and they attempt to draw lessons from seemingly random events of loss. To describe several of the more recent poems included in Frozen Spring, "No Longer Mourn for Me" uses the metaphor of the life cycle of a turtle to explain the solitary yet exquisite death of a creative, inspiring teacher whose inability to deal with his homosexuality led him to loneliness, and who found peace near the end of his life by creating a wonderful garden of flowers in a place visited by only a few people. In "Bringing Back the Dead," the point of view is that of an aging woman whose depleted, unfulfilled life forces her in her waning years to fixate on her memories of her love for her husband who died long ago. The subject matter of "The Fox" is the death of a younger brother, and his complex relationship with his mother. In this poem the image of the fox is a sort of doppelganger. The young man was fox-like in his appearance and demeanor, and the arrival of the fox at his burial, an actual occurrence, was seen by some as a manifestation of his free spirit, and by me as the spirit that resides in all of us."

"To comment on a few poems that are the beginnings of a new collection of poems, "Raven’s Rock" is a gothic poem about a local myth from the literature-rich Hudson Valley which comments on the status of women in early American society. "Splitting Wood" takes a celebrated recent New England domestic murder case and places it into context of the stark, raw-boned life of the working class woman. "Nothing’s Holding Up Nothing" is a poem that deals with the destruction of civilized society and its impact on simple human beings, in this case a nursing mother. The origin of the poem is an actual incident that occurred in El Salvador some years ago, but the venue could be countless places such as Poland or France during the Nazi occupation, or contemporary China."