"Imagining Lives" is a poetry book with a past. Bernice Lever's writing transports the reader to the 1940s and '50s, where children make mud pies and listen to family stories of the "dirty thirties." "Imagining Lives" does not only look back, however. Lever seamlessly moves forward into more contemporary times, musing on nature, technology, and the body, which emerges in almost every poem, sometimes sensuous and fluid and others stiff and dry, but always real.