Kathleen Lawless Cox's novel Maeve was written over 29 years. Her new book, the poetry collection Citizen of the Earth, has been four decades in the making.

The 68-year-old author - born in England, raised in Ireland, a U.S. resident since 1961, and a Quad Cities citizen for the bulk of the past 45 years - is matter-of-fact about the book's creation.

"I had approximately 40 years' worth of poetry sitting around," she said this week, "and I decided I would like to do a book that covered those 40 years but with the best poems that I could muster out of the pile."

If you visit the Web site for local not-for-profit-organizer-turned-author Jane Wagoner (http://www.janewagoner.com), you'll be able to read passages from her recent historical fiction, Bells of May, which follows five generations of women rooted in the Harz Mountains of Germany. Here's what you'll find on the site's first page:

"The kiss, begun in sorrow, ignited into passion, a passion born of desperation and loss, wild and unstoppable ... . They came together desperately, without nuance or soft caress. But Katherine, still virgin, was no stranger to orgasm and responded wildly to Christoph's thrusts ... ."

And trust me, things just get racier from there.