Starland

From the trapdoors and "spy/code" that once enchanted her while reading Nancy Drew, to bumblebees struck by frost "still sucking from the cups/ of blossoms," Jessica Purdy feels the pulse of mystery underlying ordinary life. Purdy negotiates the bumpy terrain of responsibility, loneliness, dreams, and estrangement in poems that often begin in the natural world and end with meditations on her place in the family landscape. Cover to cover, STARLAND is a complex, deeply felt, and finely written book. -- Joyce Peseroff, author of Know Thyself