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Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure and startling command of images and ideas, Nance Van Winckel's poems make every gesture of language count. She is the author of four books of poetry and three collections of short stories.

Aroused from stillness, a voice bestows a story, incarnates a life. Dead sister, ex-lover, mystic, dog peddler, potentate - from century to century - smitten, surviving, illuminated, united. With compassion, and with hope, these poems embrace both the brutality of the human condition and the ecstasy toward which the spirit reaches. Putting her readers ever more deeply under her spell, Van Winckel reveres and celebrates "every good thing."

Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, "Pacific Walkers" first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories--first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs--but who no longer belong to anyone.

"There is so much unpredictability and surprise in Nance Van Winckel's poems that they seem to hover, sometimes tremble, slightly ahead of the reader and writer, yet all the while rewarding anyone who cares to follow."--Li-Young Lee, author of Behind My Eyes: Poems Van Winckel's poems hover at the intersections of folktale and history, of past life regressions and future life visions, in a voice that is intimate, eerie, wry, and always strangely like a voice that has been going on in our heads without our noticing. The chill and pleasure it renders is a little like what one feels upon first reading Proust.

In Sister Zero, a woman who never wanted children suddenly becomes a mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sister commits suicide at age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himself and in almost exactly the same manner. Sister Zero is narrated through short prose sections and snippets of “advice” from Mister Ed (of the old television show), while Nance Van Winckel exhumes the sisters’ shared childhood for missed clues, interrogates memory’s accuracy, and interacts with a mother who’s disappearing into late-stage Alzheimer’s. As the shock of these deaths ripples out, the book progresses in swift strokes between the tough and tender, often staring stony-eyed at a terrifying moment, then jumping forward or backward in time to a moment of quiet humor. Each chapter begins with an altered page from the Official Guide to the 1964 World’s Fair: collages Van Winckel made as testaments to that touchstone event in New York when the sisters were children, a time she realized how huge the world was, how vastly different other countries and cultures were from her own. The Fair was all about the future, its bright and happy promises. She and her now-dead sister rode a ride called “tunnel to the future.” The sister was scared; our narrator was not.

Lynette is recuperating from botched Lasik surgery. Her eyesight is damaged, but as she “looks” back on the events of her past, she realizes she may not have seen them correctly when she was actually living them. Her husband’s death . . . was it a suicide? The bones unearthed on her uncle’s Montana ranch—are they of a steer? a mastodon? a dinosaur? Her beloved cousin Jessie—did she slip into addiction, and if so, where did the addict life take her? The dots of Lynette’s past are blurry, but she tries to focus and connect them and to feel her way toward a more accurate vision of the person she has been and may become. Lynette and her two cousins, Jessie and Buster, narrate the linked short stories that make up Boneland. Their fathers, brothers, grew up on the ranch in Montana, a place rich in dinosaur fossils that gives the book its title. Continuing an enormous task begun two generations back, one of the uncles is still reconstructing a fossil in the old hay shed. The cousins, meanwhile, carry on the family tradition of reconstructing the mysteries of the past. All three have trouble defining and maintaining their identities. And only they understand the idiosyncrasies of their family—which Nance Van Winckel treats as a character in this ingeniously linked collection of stories. The family is a creature reconstructed from the slippery events of everyone’s past. Fate is sudden and powerful in the life of this clan. A baby is dropped, a family drowned, a tsunami in Thailand changes the course of an already troubled life. Van Winckel releases time from strict adherence to chronology to reveal surprising correspondences. With shifting points of view and distinctive voices, these linked stories, in the hands of a master of the genre, capture the mutability of human experience and the meandering plot lines that make up our lives.

Stories about a Sixties commune in Washington State, a generation later. The quirky residents of Curtain Creek Farm still make sandals, weave blankets, and grow organic vegetables; but now they also have a web site; their children are having children; and into their underground homes, tree houses, and tin-roofed cabins, aging parents are coming to live with them. Nance Van Winckel "merges popular culture and utopian lifestyles with rosy, generous vision" (Publishers Weekly) in these "fully satisfying stories" (Seattle Times).

Held together by a wealth of images, items, and ideals, these tantalizing tales join Sara, Fritz, Maria, Stevie, Nona, Claudia, and Sam as one. An earthquake appears in each story, reminding us that beneath the surface all is tumult, flux. And while each quake sings of life's unpredictability and precariousness, it is joined by familiar images - player pianos, brass doorknobs, and movie posters - which fall away, often to return, altered. A number of gypsy characters, playing tangential roles at first, become central to the collection's larger story line. When Sara loses her hands after a freak accident in "Ever After", she encounters two Gypsy sisters whose scandalous family affairs permeate the rest of the book. In "Hearsay", Fritz, an out-of-work ventriloquist, is haunted by a failed love affair with a Gypsy woman thirty-four years past, and the son he never knew. In the final story of the collection, "Taking Leave", the artist Sam leaves his old life behind to start over again, while his wife seeks solace among a group of intriguing women who help her begin anew.

The new century peeled me bone bare like a song inside a warbler - that bird, people, who knows not to go where the sky's stopped. Over the years, Nance Van Winckel's extraordinarily precise and energetic voice has built upon its strengths. Unpredictable, wry, always provocative, displaying a sure and startling command of images and ideas, her poems make every gesture of language count. In No Starling, Van Winckel accomplishes what has proven to be so difficult for poets across time: a deeply satisfying balance of the spiritual and political. Although richly peopled with figures from this and parallel worlds - Simone Weil, Verlaine, Nabokov, Eurydice, "the new boys" working in the morgue, and others - No Starling moves beyond a reliance on the dramatic resonance of individual characters. Its vision is deeper, its focus both singular and communal: the self on its journey through the world ("Mouth, mouth: my light / and my exit. Let nothing / block the route"), and our responsibilities as a people for the precarious state of that world. Slate My too-sharp lefts kept making the bundle in back sluice right. I was driving with the dead Nance in the truck bed. The gas gauge didn't work so there was an added worry of running out of juice. Her word. Her word one windy evening with the carpets stripped from a floor, which surprised us as stone - slate from the quarry we were headed to now, but Let's first have us some juice, she'd said, then, barefoot on bare slate. The truck-bedded Nance, wrapped in her winding sheet, thuds left, clunks right. I'm sorry about my driving, sorry about the million lovely pine moths mottled on my windshield. Thank God, here's the quarry, and there's the high ledge, where, as a girl long ago, she'd stepped bravely from the white towel and stared down. Then she'd held her nose and leapt out into it - this same cool and radiant air.