Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2004. The poems of The Black Beach describe everyday acts like putting children to bed, coaching Little League, and sending a daughter to school, but brood over what may be behind the everyday and how to reach it and talk to it. Faith ebbs and flows like the tide on a "black beach of heaven," while these poems maintain skepticism, denying transcendence beyond what is available through love, the senses, and experience. Number Twelve: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry