For two sample poems, click the links below:

"Full of poems that stand alone as consummate achievements, Conditions and Cures nevertheless coheres as a book about life-and-death verities, strategies for survival or triumph or at least coping gracefully. The comic is one of those strategies, and Ken Waldman is often at his most hilarious when he's addressing subjects another poet might murder with solemnity. In addition he frequently engages with demanding forms like pantoums, villanelles, sestinas and sonnets, submitting to their guidance but never losing his independence. The secret of such a trick is his ear: a professional musician, Waldman swears final allegiance to the body of our language, its sonorities and rhythms, to its possibilities as song--a co-strategy with the comic. The book ends with the image of a shed snake skin, announcing the poet's faith in loss as a beginning, in transformation as the essence of any life fully lived. Slip into the skin that is this book Waldman has shed and marvel at its fit."

-- Philip Dacey

"Ken Waldman captures and catalogues the frailties of our human condition, both inner and outer, body and soul. But his Conditions and Cures is not a book of elegies and lamentations. These are poems about how the body repairs and the soul recovers. These poems have a Bosch-like exuberance, especially in the face of the worst. Suffering is always present, but the "cure" is in our capacity to know our condition, and then to sing about it, as these poems do so well."

-- Fred Marchant