Two books published in the last year by Modern English Tanka Press, Alexis Rotella's tanka collection LIP PRINTS and Denis Garrison's collection of formal and free verse SAILOR IN THE RAIN AND OTHER POEMS have been listed in the "Best Books for Summer Reading, 2008" by Book Review Editor Grace Cavalieri in The Montserrat Review.
http://www.themontserratreview.com/BestoSummer2008.html 

Lip Prints Tanka and Other Short Poems 1979–2007 by Alexis Rotella
Price: $21.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-6151-6501-1. Trade paperback. 160 pages.
Price: $35.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-6151-6502-8. Hardcover with dust jacket. 160 pages.
“Lip Prints by Alexis Rotella is her most beautifully crafted and imagistic book to date.” —Maria Mazziotti Gillan, editor of Paterson Literary Review and author of Italian Women in Black Dresses (Guernica Editions)
“Alexis Rotella has been writing free-form tanka with a lyrical, confessional voice exploring a wide range of emotions, feelings and insights. Her tanka, though firmly grounded in the American landscape of experiences, follow the ‘no subject off limits’ approach championed by the famous Modernist Japanese tanka poets, Akiko and Hiroshi Yosano (Tekkan). Alexis has the ability to capture a relationship in a phrase and deepen the moment of insightful feeling with surprising attention to details that tell us ‘the rest of the story.’ Her new collection, Lip Prints, is an opportunity for tanka readers to enjoy a rich body of work drawn from over thirty years of being a very alive writer.” —Randy Brooks, Editor Mayfly Magazine, Professor of English, Millikin University

Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems by Denis M. Garrison
Price: $19.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-6151-8555-2. Trade paperback. 136 pages.
Price: $37.95 USD. ISBN 978-0-6151-8497-5. Hardcover with dust jacket. 136 pages.
“Contained in Sailor in the Rain are some of the best poems of an American original, Denis M. Garrison.  . . . Garrison’s sense of place and region, and his consciousness and reckoning of good and evil, order and chaos, truth and deceit, are all essential to his character as a poet, and that character relates his work to a diverse group of poets who span several centuries and have similar interests and thematic pre-occupations. His ‘Confessio’ might have been written by John Donne, as part of that poet’s series of ‘Holy Sonnets.’ Garrison’s haunted and haunting landscapes relate to similar metaphysical elements found in the earliest American poets and prose masters: Edward Taylor and Philip Freneau, Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garrison’s concerns with symbolic argument and imagery (including the ambiguous and macabre) find their precursors in Edgar Alan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Stéphane Mallarmé —the latter, also, for a shared fascination for the interplay and revelations of style and content that a poet may achieve when pursuing the essence of invented, perfect poetic forms.” —Michael McClintock, in his Preface to Sailor in the Rain and Other Poems.

Grace Cavalieri has authored 14 books and 20 produced plays. She was a founder of radio station WPFW-FM in Washington D.C. Her program " The Poet and the Poem" has been on public radio for 30 years without interruption, now from the Library of Congress via NPR satellite. She has founded two poetry presses in Washington DC.

Worth noting: Both books have cover art by Karen McClintock of Fresno, California.  

It is very gratifying to have a tanka collection, in particular, on the same list with poets like Charles Simic, Mark Doty, and Rod Jellema.