”The figure of the beloved in these spare, lyrical poems of mourning is a young daughter, a ‘bird child who choreographed my murmuring lips,’ whose absence returns the poet to a state of spiritual and linguistic prima materia: a ‘wasteland of irony,’ clay breath, and orphaned wolves. And yet from these elegiac archipelagos comes incantations so tender and haunting that they reanimate the very subject of lyric address (‘O you, my pilgrim, my vein’), and transform the speaker, as she becomes both her child and a postlapsarian creator, awaiting from within a ‘stable of vanished gods’ the ‘rise to mercy's debris.’
—Virginia Konchan, author of The End of Spectacle
