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A Metaphorical God

Persea Books, 2008

“She’s a polyphonic prestidigitator, a virtuoso of the vibrant heart, and — stunning in our fallen world — a genuine metaphysician, with all the healing aptitude the word implies.”

— Linda Gregerson

“Dazzling….She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips.”

— The Yale Review

Read a review of A Metaphorical God in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Read a review of A Metaphorical God in Michigan Quarterly Review.

Excerpts from A Metaphorical God

Fond romantic, I’ve followed the map farther
than asphalt, taken myself up to the bare
coordinates where the compass rose blooms.

I’m quick to see the cartographer’s flourish
as a valentine, quicker to want what beauty
forced its mark here, to lose my bearings by it:

let my north be this rosy seduction
of sandstone flashed with quartz, my east that far, high mountain
shining like all the kingdoms of the world.

(from “Three Bouquets”)

Spring begins in a fatness of front lawns,
but not mine. I whose blowtorch urge approaches
the ascetic, whose resolve to bury

luxuriance grows raw-handed from shoveling,
have duly torched and shoveled grass until
the baked blades crumpled like old palm fronds

and their upturned roots drooped.

(from “Ash Garden”)

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Leviathan with a Hook

Persea Books, 2002

“It is a beautiful book, and an unusual one … Its remarkable lucidity, its seductive energy, its lushness, and its music form a vision in which the real and the transcendental are indistinguishable.”

— Mark Strand

“No other poet writing today gives as she does, like a spirit of harvest, so much of the fragrant, astonishing, living and dying world, and makes it so sweetly and sternly known.”

— Allen Grossman

“Wild, inventive, hungry, celebratory … These poems fear neither glory nor ruin.”

— Rosanna Warren

Read a review of Leviathan with a Hook in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Read a review of Leviathan with a Hook in The Yale Review.

Excerpts from Leviathan with a Hook

Winter enfolds us, a fabric of tenterhooks.
Sunlight from everywhere whitens the room.
My south wind, my wingspan,
how can we unwinter ourselves?

(from “Squall Line”)

…Seasonal
the ritual, pinching aphids as I kneel
upturned, squinting sunward for the sleek

daredevil flight, for the promise of the climb,
of sunlit wings, of plain things charged
and fulgent, of one perfect
performance, of earth as it is in heaven.

(from “Pater Noster”)