The ambition of Ish Klein's debut collection, UNION!, like that of the Soviet/Russian "Soyuz" space program it's named after, is to take us to another world so that we may better see our own. Klein traverses ocean, earth, and sky with spiritual longing as she compassionately describes human loneliness, and each poem is a love letter written to a civilization left behind. Here is a voice like "A spark from Hard Silence made mad," replete with yearning and fierce with mystery, and even as the poems teeter on the invisible line between wit and sorrow, each poem attests to Klein's promise: "I sympathize with all the creatures in this story."

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Ish Klein's published books are THE NEW SUN TIME (Canarium, 2020), CONSOLATION AND MIRTH (Canarium, 2015), MOVING DAY (Canarium, 2011), and UNION! (Canarium, 2009), and her poems have also appeared in Triple Canopy, Fence, jubilat, Versal, on the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere. Ish is a founding member of the Connecticut River Valley Poets Theater. Her play, In A Word, Faust, has been performed internationally and was published by the Cambridge Literary Review. She's also the author of many other plays, including Partial Tempest, The Dee Men, Drummer 41, and The Orchids, which was a finalist for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers.