Winner of the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award

If you’re not careful, Alison Stone will devour you.
Although she announces in one poem that love is a room she enters ‘sideways,’ Stone’s appetite for the physical and spiritual is never selective. It hunts down all things, sacred and profane. The anaphoric poem “My Hunger” finishes ‘Mangy and mateless, /my hunger gobbles chocolate, sunsets, ‘children, prizes, flame. /my hunger is an animal without a proper name.’ ….

The poems in Alison Stone’s They Sing at Midnight risk many “nows.” They image and idea, whisper and howl, implore and grieve. Their versions of the mundane and the mystic engage us, offer shape and texture to the ‘messy bright life we are born for.’ But her poems also deliver the hard fact that ‘decay is in the air,’ and, despite any hard-fought faith, we don’t get out of here alive. As such her poetics serve notice of the metaphysical amid the imminent, how Persephone is always and forever descending and returning, death into life, and life into death. Such wisdom is Stone’s gift to us.”

—Thom Ward, from the forward

“Stone slips a carving knife under the skin of convention, eviscerating appearances, revealing the savage truth…Kill to get one.”

—Hugo Williams

“Stone offers lean and sparkling poetry that invites us to join with it – poems that are, in their way, multi-faceted spaces to explore, discovering what we may, and grafting what we bring.”

—Verse Wisconsin