Photograph with Girls

In her first poetry collection, Nancy Carol Moody chronicles family, comments wittily on headline news, and, with varied subjects and forms, crafts language that engages and surprises. Her persona poems allow Emily Dickinson and JonBenét Ramsey to share secrets. She creates a tour-de-force sestina with the names of those lost in a plane crash. She examines the cover photograph of four young women and makes a tender inventory of their various fates. From start to finish, whether in received or invented forms, Moody tells about the reading "that exposed me to words" and how "sound becomes us, and then/there is the silence." Her language deciphers and discovers. It permits her careful handling of life's common disruptions-the gaps between girls and women, past and present, personal and public, proximate and distant. Photograph with Girls is an eloquent compendium of our circumstances. This poetry helps us recognize the somewhat broken, the somewhat repaired.