Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown' s This Bright Darkness. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment.McKinstry-Brown writes of a time " when a mother is told over and over/ that her daughter is just another/ siren, warning, a story to be taught." And isn' t this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake. - Stacey Waite
