Graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, Peter Sears has taught at Reed College and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College and as community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Northwest Review, The Atlantic, Seneca Review, Antioch Review, Left Bank, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and many other publications. He has been anthologized in Night Out: Poems about Hotels, Motels, Restaurants, and Bars; Scribner’s Poets for Students: A Scribner’s Student Encyclopedia; Season of Dead Water; Voices for the Land; and other anthologies. Sears has also authored three previous books: Tour: New and Selected Poems, Secret Writing, and I'm Gonna Bake Me  a Rainbow Poem. Praise for The Brink “Though wide-ranging and in three distinct parts, The Brink has a cohesiveness resulting from the poet's consistently fresh and inventive language. There is nothing predictable here. In poem after poem delightful images crop up:‘...a big branch split / off at the trunk white as chicken meat’ and ‘Even in summer, the dead wear overcoats, / like drunks.’ And ‘We move as one, like cilia.’ There are many such winners in this collection, which is also distinguished by the opening section containing monologues by the very old.”                                                                                   —Vern Rutsala “So believable and human a voice—the sound of a man talking—that it comes as a surprise to find that among the affecting poems here is a sequence couched in a voice of a very old woman also believable, very human.”                                                                                         —Donald Justice “Peter Sears shapes his marvelous poems out of the American vernacular, and can give us the willies as he juxtaposes a quiet natural image against the jazz of colloquial speech. The voices in The Brink—stubborn, lyrical, self-doubting, brilliantly intuitive—allow us to listen in on the spirit struggling both to accept and to escape the frail, disappearing cage of the body.”                                                                                         —Maura Stanton