This week, Michael Waters will demonstrate the versatility and universality of poetry, giving poetry readings in Bucharest, Romania (July 24) and Brasov, Romania (July 27). Waters, who has published ten collections of poetry, including five from BOA, has a deep connection to Romania, where many of his poems are set. In a recent article in The Prague Post (The Czech Republic's English-language newspaper), Stephan Delbos notes the qualities that make Water's art so appealing and innovative: "[Waters]..has been quietly writing some of the best poetry in the United States for the past three decades... Waters' work has moved steadily toward mastery from a starting point of estimable strength and precision." His poetry, Delbos continues, is poetry "steeped in the world," featuring an "unusual command of language [that] literally changes words before our eyes, a metamorphosis described so acutely that, like alchemy, it almost leaves us incredulous." Tensions in Waters' poems emerge in the conflict between the beautiful and the vulgar in our past and present,  and more complexly, the beautiful within the vulgar that is often forced before our eyes. But from this tension, according to Delbos, emerges "the development and mastery of a poet who hasn't lost faith in the power of language to shape the world, no matter how beautiful and violent - and vulgar - both our language and our world may be." Books by Michael Waters