Nurses Who Love English

In "Nurses Who Love English, "Paula Marie Coomer chronicles the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to the emergence of war and a life wobbling under the impact of world events: the loss of livelihood, a year of unemployment, record gasoline prices and mega-inflation, and a return to hospital nursing after having been a contracted university instructor, with its accompanying strain on a 50-year-old body. In the shadows, events that should have been celebrations become emotional struggles--the empty nest, children marrying and becoming parents themselves, finding late-life love. Lyrical, emotional, and, in the words of award-winning poet Paisley Rekdal, "at once carefully wrought and yet full of spontaneity . . . both tough-minded yet fragile," the poems in this collection are powerful, graceful, and reveal the conflicting perspectives of a poet of Midwest upbringing who hails from a Kentucky mountain heritage, independent-minded yet vulnerable, a woman struggling to survive a difficult time in history alone in the rural Intermountain West.