Poetry. In Maeve Kinkead's poems, looking is both dangerous and necessary, as is looking away. In these brief lyric poems, guilt, blame, terror, and sorrow weave their way through 'a fine cloudless day' to the 'crowded church' where a mother makes a fist against God, against the gods, while the speaker, not yet born, claims 'No one saw her do this, I saw her do this.' Such contradictions, capturing our impossible human condition, flood these beautifully unsettling poems. Yeats's apprehension--'for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand'--haunts and accompanies this gorgeous first book.--Catherine Barnett

Maeve Kinkead's poems tell secrets, skin griefs, and make contact with the dead. At their best, they combine sincerity with hunger in memorable poems of restrained beauty.--Henri Col