num_pages: 70
description: "With this...full-length collection, that strong knife-sharp voice...draws together the stories of a woman's confrontation with loss, betrayal, disappointment, and passion, rendered in language both plain-spoken and powerful. There is no fancy language here, no turning away from what demands to be said straight out. Whether they take as their subject the lost baby who "weighed a pound and lived through the night," the neighbor whose husband has Alzheimer's, or the lines running across the poet's face as she stares in the mirror, these poems sting like the cold metal of the harmonica the poet runs between her lips in "Music," acknowledging that she knows nothing of how to play it or any other musical instrument. What she does know is music of another kind, her own woman's music, "the pressure of one thing against another, how hollowness makes sound." —Kathryn Stripling Byer
  RACING
After my father's carhit the wall and flipped over,someone used to such things must have run to the trackexpecting the best,and others must have sobbedwhen they placed their handson his still chest.Aunt Carry showed us the clippingyears after it happened;we'd stopped in Spartanburg to visit,and she gave me his birth certificate to keep.On the way home I said,If you live dangerously,you can die dangerously.Mother didn't hear.She was saying I never wished your father any harm.Bur I wondered after what I heardof nights she sat inside a carwith the motor running,and him behind another woman's door,the liquor she rushed to the drain until finally love was as thin as the sheetsshe threw her suitcase on. 
language: English
title: Drop Zone
titlecomplete: Drop Zone
awards: awardedAt: 757411200000
name: Texas Review Southern and Southwestern Poets Breakthrough Award
publisher: Texas Review Press