Poetry. "With a voice that speaks of the simultaneous desolation and burgeoning hopefulness of our time, Stempleman's STRING PARADE begs us to listen again to an American landscape long forgotten, yet still around. It is a landscape full of children and families, of old Hollywood glamour, of worn out streets, of gardens, of domestic scenes full of ache, of heavy rain clouds, of dedication. As the title suggests, images and people float at us in endless sequences, strung together in a language of the everyday. Here in these poems, Stempleman creates a spectacle of dedication for the everyday people he loves, which by the end of the book, we realize is all of us. And thankfully, I am, that it is so, that this poet loves me, and that I can feel his weighty love for his readers in every word. In an American poetry, it should always be the case, that our poets love us tenderly despite all our human imperfections"--Dorothea Lasky.