What “Figures” seems to be both expressing and enacting is the infinite interconnectedness of things and the way that metaphor (and other figures of speech) can help us in apprehending that mystery.

I love Lizette Woodworth Reese’s “All Hallows Night” because it bridges religions and cultures as a remembrance of people—family members, community heroes, saints, and martyrs—who have died.

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.

  Lamentation for the Children   Children come, bringing bliss and wretchedness. They come ready to be bruised. Chain us with the soft tentacles of their openness. Leave us pierced and threaded, bound for time with thorns, singing behind the palings of love. Like children. Though we are not. Don’t look back, not once, at the trembling in your arms,…

“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.

“In Late Summer” opens with a vivid image that, for me, captures the essence of August in New England. Almost immediately, there is a sense of endings.

Narrative poems move time forward; lyric poems often try to capture the experience of a single moment in time, and reading “Hum”—especially aloud—presents the brief but unforgettable experience of getting buzzed by a hummingbird.