Bold Type's Poetry Editor Ernest Hilbert writes "in his introduction to the Winter 1995-96 issue of Ploughshares, Strand wrote that he was 'not concerned with truth, nor with conventional notions of what is beautiful.' This is true in many cases of his own poetry. He finds beauty in unsettling stillness and slow realization. His poems share more with the airy landscapes of Albert Cuyp than the violently tragic paintings of Francisco Goya. Beyond this, Strand is more surrealist than expressionist. But setting to one side the sometimes surrealistic veneer of the poems, we encounter an exquisite and gravid reality, a hyper-real world that has been locked expectantly into place like a painted landscape."

Read an interview with Mark Strand, the poem 'A Piece of the Storm', and an excerpt from The Weather of Words.