Voodoo for the Other Woman

In this collection of largely narrative poems about relationships, a narrator often appears, offering glimpses of her parents’ hardscrabble marriage in the Appalachia of the 1960s, her own coming of age in the 1970s, a young marriage of her own and the subsequent unraveling of it in the 1980s. In the aftermath and in the more current decades, newer relationships emerge and others resolve in poems with striking images: a cracked birdbath with a dead sparrow in its dry bowl, a lava lamp leaking blue gel amid other forgotten belongings, a shattered headboard and hammer-beaten pillows. These poems tell of loss and love through the aching, small details, the visions that remain long after a relationship ends or you close the book on pain.