Hurricane Walk

Hurricane Walk is Diann Blakely's first volume of poetry. Originally published in 1992, it was named one of the ten best verse collections published that year by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. With this collection, Blakely artfully mines the empathic center of each poem, fearlessly crafting an achingly personal portrait of contemporary life and family that is both sweet and razor sharp.

"What poetry does best and perhaps does most plaintively," Blakely has said, "is to remind us of the absences and losses of the world we currently suffer and revel in. It is very much the language of intimacy." And this is what her work achieves at its best. Blakley wrings a refined sense of intimacy from her carefully crafted verses, revealing the fragile essence of the female experience and, moreover, of the human condition.