Dangerous Enough

In her third collection, Alison Stone presents us with forty-two poems of struggle and redemption. Her style is crisp and unencumbered by literary pretense. Stone evokes the raw emotions that inspired her poems with a rare honesty and clarity. Although her main theme is femininity and maternal love in a dangerous world, she takes her readers into the shared common experiences that bind us together as humans. The torment of AIDS, memories of drug abuse and the loss of loved ones provide imagistic mirrors to all human suffering in her poems. Simply put, they connect to real experience transfigured into language as experience in itself. These poems saw original publication in the best literary magazines, including Barrow Street, Poet Lore, Poetry, The Paris Review and Ploughshares. Stone’s work has received the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award, Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award.

“Alison Stone’s poems in Dangerous Enough engage the reader, give us plenty to re-examine about whatever forming assumptions we may have, but above all these poems light us up and jab us with sincerity that affirms for us that we are in the presence of a genuine life and talent.”
Michael Todd Steffen, Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

“I appreciate the daring it took for so many of these poems to be written and I can see the work as an emotional and literary break- through....Dangerous Enough should get a lot of discussion and talk and I feel it deserves attention among the literati.”
Kirby Congdon, Small Press Review

“Reading Alison Stone’s searing collection Dangerous Enough feels like childbirth - anesthesia optional - leaving one bloodied and drained, joy tinged with wince, and after a great hue and cry, blessed relief and reward. Notwithstanding their lovely and subtle crafting, these poems — these stones – aim for (and smack right into) the solar plexus. Early on, the poet states that she was ‘on my way to everywhere.’ She got there, but (as happens when having a baby), the process left a scar.”
-Cindy Hochman, The Pedestal Magazine