Carol Ann Duffy has published four highly praised collections of poetry. Her last, Mean Time, won the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Prize. She lives in Manchester, England.

"[Duffy] offers us the past as it could have been. . . . [Her] project recalls the poems of the Americans Ai and Pamela White Hadas, but the élan of this volume sets it apart, the characters (and poems) triumphant." --The New Yorker

"Duffy is one of the freshest and bravest talents to emerge in British poetry--any poetry--for years." --Eavan Boland, The Independent on Sunday (London)

"These thirty poems vibrate with intense colloquialisms, physicality, energy, freshness, and cheek. . . . They leap off the page even in a silent reading. . . . The best are inventive, subversive, and written with great rhythmical and rhyming dash." --Anthony Thwaite, The Sunday Telegraph (London)