Acclaimed poet David Cope's fifth collection, Turn the Wheel, opens with a lean dawn, farewell to old loves and challenges to new, past sorrows and tenderness filling the older poet's dreams, tender petals for calm crossing. Here too is ground zero struggle for compassion, lost worlds in the valley of the sun, finale a broken note, herons under the jetliner's blast path near the shaking train stuffed with its cargo of dead dreams. Praise for Turn the Wheel:

The news that stays news is the modus operandi of Turn the Wheel: bracing, smart, tight, perfectly greased works, luminous and poignant by turn. I enjoy Cope's stretch from familial to sublime and his consummate poet's generous heart. The songs keep churning and turning after the pages do their turn. "I send you this wish where tender petals turn, open in both darkness and light." -Anne Waldman

"David Cope's poetry reaches into true silence and from that place within himself derives its indelible sanity of gothic dreams, direct musicality, sustained multiple resonance, objectivist heart, vernacular ear. His work is a paradox of detached lyricism confronting the abysses of his soul. Like old Shakyamuni Buddha living anonymous civilian life to its fullest in debacle America, turning the wheel of U.S. Dharma, Cope visualizes the path of emptiness and great resting in awakened nature." -Jim Cohn