The speakers of Christopher Locke"s WAITING FOR GRACE & OTHER POEMS regard despair as an affront, something to be resisted as if one"s life depended on it: "we always tried to make sense of it all,//even as the day turned cold and late, even as/dusk called the first stars up out of their graves." "These are honest and beautiful-sometimes wrenching-poems. Immaculately crafted, they are full of fresh metaphors and language, yet, at the same time, absolutely clear. I so admire them. -- Patricia Fargnoli "Christopher Locke is a poet with huge imaginative and metaphorical gifts, i.e., his imagination is poetic. An angry Nun stands over his speaker in the third grade "...her skirt as black/as a tornado before it inhales a barn." Or, (in the same poem!) a teenage ballplayer"s body "is loose as rainwater." Visceral, lucid, original--Waiting for Grace is a terrific (in the colloquial as well as its original meaning) book." --Thomas Lux "The post-punk speaker of these poems, who confesses "I...