My Kindred

Balancing curiosity, beauty, surprise, and the weight of mortality, this book's kinship embraces multitudes: fir, owl, manatee, and pollen; sun, sea, lily, and snake; the poet's parents, Paul and Grace Whitman; the Good Gray Poet Whitman. Each poem bears witness to concentricity--the poet inviting trees to live inside her, a tree expanding itself to accept her body. Some of the poet's kindred--the Biblical Eve, water's sister, a lake, the moon, everyday moths, and more--speak for themselves. What's mundane is never merely that. In this kinship, the commonplace carries a wild sentience, a mythic and sacred essence. Like the hummingbird, these poems pull--from our all too dark world--a thread of sweetness and bounty.