Women's Voices For Change

My father, a math and astronomy professor at a small university in the rural Midwest, taught me to look up and learn about the night sky.

These four poems share very similar paths of creation. An unexpected sighting—backyard bird, beloved fossil, lost poet, solar eclipse—set in motion a questioning of inherited models: cultural, cognitive, and physical.

“Before the Killing Frost” is suffused with longing for the natural world—an almost physical grief at summer’s end—and the longing for a beloved.

In the end, we are left not just with a sense of the speaker’s relationship with her mother, both before and after her death, but also with a sense of the history that made her mother the person she was.

I love poems like this one that help me retrieve memories of my childhood in Pennsylvania.

“The Bay” is about loss, but also about what is not lost; about death, but also new life; about stasis and stagnation, but also about the breeze picking up and new life quickening in stem, blossom, and vine.

Poetry speaks, in part, the language of place—exterior, interior, and especially the intersection where the outer and inner come together, that vital third place that is evoked, sometimes subtly, in these poems, which focus on my journey from the woods to the city and from marriage to divorce and beyond.