To celebrate National Poetry Month, I'm participating in The Big Poetry Giveaway this year organized by poet Kelli Russell Agodon. Each participating blogger commits to giving away two books of poetry. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post from now through April 30th saying you'd like to be entered in the drawing to win one of the books that I will randomly choose for you. I will choose the two winners on May 1 and announce them on Frontal Junkyard. I'll get a mailing address from you if you win and you'll receive your book.

To find our more about the competition or if you're a blogger who wants to get involved in the giveaway, please visit this link at Kelli's blog.

Here's what I'm giving away to two lucky people:

1) Steady, My Gaze (Tebot Bach, 2011) by Marie-Elizabeth Mali. 

 “STEADY, MY GAZE is a metaphysical page-turner. Marie-Elizabeth Mali is not fooling around—she means to find her way to the real—each poem makes possible the next—a breathtaking debut.”
—Marie Howe

"'Wholehearted' is an undervalued word; to my mind it means not blind enthusiasm or unthinking embrace but something more like the full consent of the self to experience, to be present in the glorious and wounding matrix of the here and now. I can't think of a better word for Marie-Elizabeth Mali's poems. She wants 'the honeyed sizzle beyond all language,' wants to be a vulnerable and conscious participant in the life of things as they are, awake to love and the struggle to live freely and compassionately. 'How to hold the ocean,' she asks, 'when the vessel leaks? Rise your wild, / dear animal...'"—Mark Doty.

2) Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) by Traci Brimhall. This book won the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and was a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award and is all-around an amazing book. To learn more about Traci, please visit her website.

“With a stunning mastery of metaphor, linguistic precision, and a soulful determined vision, Brimhall’s work reveals an artist tuned to the significance of everyday experience, from the panicking heartbeats of birds to the spiking pulse of mice.” —Dorianne Laux

“This emotionally articulate, intense debut gives us the myth of self in its various incarnations: elegiac, surreal, meditative, erotic, dreamlike. I love [Brimhall’s] luscious verbal texturing and lyric slipperiness, an assertive voice, a sensuality, a glow. A beautiful book.” —Ilya Kaminsky

“The poems in Traci Brimhall’s Rookery make beautiful the brutal as she casts an uncompromising eye on the vagaries of faith, the disappointments of the human heart—and the uneasy interstices between animal consciousness and ours. . . . Part incantation, part lamentation, the language in these poems is sensual and urgent.” —Claudia Emerson