Stein's poems reveal the constancy of the American quest for work, family, and dignity, even as they evoke the bruised but still redemptive fruit of human compassion.''Kevin Stein's poems are treasure houses of the spirit. This superb storyteller braves the insidious, the irrational, the unpredictable, the dangerous in our common lives. What is amazing about the poems in his Bruised Paradise is the compassion that survives in them against all odds.''--John Knoepfle
