Persephone Heads for the Gate Book

The tender attention with which Merrill Douglas holds the things of this world is breathtaking: "small brown birds/going chink, chink like coins in the ivy," "sun licks billows/of garlicky lamb smoke/that roll above street fair earrings," a toasted marshmallow that "flakes on my tongue with the taste of charred news," or "the sound my grown body releases/now when I unfasten my bra." It is a deep and moving pleasure to spend time in the world of these poems, poems that suggest, no, insist that to live is to "immerse your face in mud and then arise...," to "pinch together thumb and index finger to tweeze/unending filaments of joy from the air...." —Marilyn McCabe