Desire Reclining (Poets, Penguin)

When Carolyn Forché chose Barbara Cully's first book, The New Intimacy, for the National Poetry Series, she wrote, "Cully is a poet reading the world for the brutality of its inequities, aware of the flattening compression of historical memory and the dissolution of the body." This new book offers a critique of the "heroic" that results in elegy and wisely offers no resolution. These poems point to the forms of faith as both genius and as the fount of much of the world's anguish. Such writing proceeds from the recognition of the end of irony; in it elegy has become, finally, all.