Begin Empty-Handed

Winner of the 2013 Perugia Press Prize, the poems in BEGIN EMPTY-HANDED ride the hinge between the life expected and the reality of life in process. In response, the mid-life speaker pivots between empathy and disengagement, paradox and believability. While she surrenders to hard truths--loss of parent, enduring marriage, daughters in trouble, for example--she changes the subject, she digresses, then she looks straight at the pain. Throughout, she remains remarkably witty and ironic. No illness, damage, or danger is made light of; painful situations are witnessed or resisted with a raw, honest, and intermittently comic attitude as the poet goes about the brutal work of letting go.