No electricity. No running water. For more than twenty years, this is how former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser lived with his family--reading by lamplight, growing their own food, carrying their own water. Wormser's much-lauded memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring (UPNE, 2008), tells the story of his life spent surrounded by nature. Throughout his memoir, the reader is treated again and again to the kinds of elegant reflections that could only come from the mind of such a brilliant poet.

The Road Washes Out in Spring is now in paperback, and though it was the first prose work published by the renowned poet, thankfully it's not the last. Wormser is a gifted writer, and his subtle and inspired observations sparkle just as clearly here as they do in his verse. His new collection, The Poetry Life: Ten Stories (CavanKerry, 2008) continues the trend. He takes on a cast of ten unique narrators, from clowns to waitresses to assisted-living aides, each musing over a poet who's affected them. What emerges is a rich portrait of inner lives, and the unexpected reach and power of poetry as it takes hold. As fellow poet Tim Seibles says, Wormser "invites us to reconsider the connection between poetry and our lives, to remember that we really do live hungry for inner vision, for small insights that can save us from the slag heap of goofdom and pointlessness."

And for the uninitiated, a new collection brings together highlights from Wormser's past work as well as never before published new poems: Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (Sarabande, 2008). These works show the former Poet Laureate at his best, attempting (in his words) "to practice balance and imbalance, trace symmetry and asymmetry, toy with words and honor them."