The poems in Mary Beth Hines’s first collection, Winter at a Summer House, strike a wonderful balance between narratives of everyday experience and a pristine, pure poetic imagination. Always rhythmically diverse, most of the time mellifluous, and often intense, Hines’s poetry vividly paints the life of a modern self-made woman, with her worries and obligations, her family, and her dreams. In response to the heroine’s world, this poetry, never static, vibrates with all sorts of emotions: love, friendship, youthful infatuations, amorousness, jealousy, altruism. As a result, the book gives its reader all the pleasures of a novel—and of lyric novelty. Katia Kapovich, author of Gogol in Rome and Cossacks and Bandits Mary Beth Hines sings to us out of the staircases, back yards, and swimming pools of a life sumptuously lived, a world rife with joys and enticements, with girlhood wish and adulthood tryst. Each song lifts on the updrafts of a language passionately breathed. The poems are arrayed with such stunning craft that the art dissolves into the narrative. One forgets that one is reading and imagines that one is reliving this life. Winter at a Summer House is, in the words of one of the poems, a “gift to spark remembrance,” as if the memories had become our own. Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach From birth/death and first/last words–– the poems in Mary Beth Hines’s collection, Winter at a Summer House, entice us into the arc of a woman’s life, and tip us into her fall from innocence into experience. The poems are dares, flirting with risk, and holding bliss and danger in a tactile bond of “teeth and ice, breath and coyotes.” They give us what we want from poetry: to be bundled up and awakened; to be reminded before the storm that the storm is coming. We must hold hands and walk under the shape-shifting sky of “old faces––familiar, before they split/and spill, erase us.” Kelly DuMar, author of girl in tree bark, Tree of the Apple, and All These Cures Kirkus Review: A poet's debut collection swims through the cycles of life. Hines grew up in Massachusetts, adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean, and the poems in this debut collection are filled with richly detailed imagery evoking the sea—of characters swimming, bathing, diving, as if time were an unpredictable element, and living a process of navigating unexpected currents. Each of the volume's six sections is associated with a different phase of life; one poem features an infant taking a bath ("As water rushes from the tap, rainbow bubbles/ build then snap. Waves ripple her legs and chest"), while a later work features a more independent and stronger protagonist going to the water to "dive/ the way he taught me,/ beeline into surf swell,/ under mayhem, into sparkle." The richness of Hines's poetic structure is powerfully auditory, often reminiscent of the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The sounds and syncopated rhythms of her language are just as vital as the subjects she describes, as when "the baby cried/ his distress disguised/ as hunger for the tender/ tongue of touch" or when adults yearn to remain in "a place where the taste of salt might linger/ on remembered skin." Personal experiences intertwine with vivid imagery in Hines' poems, offering a tactile description of living that's often baffling but always meaningful; it's a world where "Sometimes grownups kiss. Sometimes they cut./ It's hard to explain but some like to draw blood." The voices within this collection savor each moment of play, each sensation, and each moment before the sun descends. A dynamic and colorful set of poems inspired by water and ocean imagery. Mary Beth Hines is an award-winning poet who grew up in Massachusetts where she spent Saturday afternoons pursuing stories and poems deep in the stacks of the Waltham Public Library. She earned a bachelor of arts in English from The College of the Holy Cross, and studied for a year at Durham University in England. She began a regular creative writing practice following a career in public service (Volpe Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts), leading national outreach, communications, and workforce programs. Her poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction appear in dozens of literary journals and anthologies both nationally and abroad, and her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.  Winter at a Summer House  is her first poetry collection. When not reading or writing, she swims, walks in the woods, plays with friends, travels with her husband, and enjoys life with their family, including their two beloved grandchildren.