She is the author of four previous collections of poetry. Weaving through its diversity of form, voice, and place is a sense of non-digressive progression and procession. The progression flows through a series of defining moments, both her own and those of other artists, toward and finally into an aesthetic of the particular. The procession, however, is a pilgrimage like that of pig-bearing initiates to the Eleusinian cave, its undisclosed but inevitable purpose the education of the mind to see and accept what gods and ancestors have made manifest. The poems wend through Bordeaux, Loch Leven, Alaska, the Kumins' farm, Santa Fe, central Pennsylvania's Happy Valley, the condos of affluent retirees, Berlin, and the Cote d'Azur into New York's pocket gardens and the Lower East Side.
Resistance is a problematic subject for one determined to refuse enclosure and division.
Not only in layers of linguistics and etymology but also in layers of identification with the poems' subjects, often artists or animals, the poet finds a way to visit her own life as an artist, a survivor, a Jew, and visit it not as autobiography but as exemplum, story from the ordinary world that directs attention to a larger moral or spiritual realm which manifests both as a place and a tone. Grateful for a body that could feel XXX this simple balance, some might call indifference , a form of moderation unfamiliar to the angry and ambitious. A surprising variation from the Hassidic and Germanic legend of the young man who gains magical knowledge of the world by understanding birdsong, the language of the overworld, here the young girl understands streamsong, how what is mute underlies all language, all art. This is the stand of the Amidah, a prayer offered by a Jewish congregation to describe the truth on which the worshippers stand. It is a redemptive community, a community of outriders, a community laced with death where those who might have been kept outside are acknowledged as belonging.