The Way of All the Earth: Poems

These poems have a visual richness, narrative depth and lyric beauty that invites the reader into their world. That world is populated by women in the grips of religious fanaticism, drunkards and child molesters, lovers and mothers and sisters, and at the center of it a young woman trying to find the words to tell the tales of a life, and make sense of the way we all struggle to cope with life's burdens and recognize life's beauty. These poems tell the story of the way we all do the best we can to love and to live. As one poem says, "It wasn't the healing, ever, that mattered./ It was the love, even done this poorly,/ what little we could do with what the world allowed:/our battered hands and this God."