Imaginal Marriage

The mesmerizing poems in Stanford’s third collection move deftly from the kiss of the hummingbird’s fringed tongue to apocalypse, from midwives’ magical cures to a gritty New Jersey overpass. The poems take place in Brazil, in the Interior, and in the home, another kind of interior, and the book is a journey through both, harrowing and rewarding. Stanford reminds us “[t]he same frame that contains us sometimes lets us go.”