Poetry. What Books Press is proud to publish the poems from its first Open Reading selection. Laurie Blauner's It Looks Worse Than I Am compelled the editors by its deft and fearless language, shifting tonalities, and discomforting surrealism. The creature she calls the animal is delightfully recognizable to any reader, as are the poems' dreamers, forlorn, and misanthropes who exist in a condition of otherness that can't be appeased. In playful and savage language she reminds us: There's blood everywhere and a throat full of rabbits. Intent is what happens to others.