Through the Square Window (Poetry Book Society Choice)

Fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood are themes explored in this collection of poems, which are by turns tender, exuberant, and unsettling. Pitched against envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts—from Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll’s Alice—that amplify the depth of the collection. These selections are an examination of motherhood and infancy, which is the rich and contested territory in which what it means to be human in a precarious world is disclosed.