She takes delight in everything from the mist of a waterfall in Venezuela to her husband’s creative use of bananas. She confronts mortality in a moving elegy for her father, in the suicide of her husband’s first wife, and the haunted words of a firefighter who dug up a human foot from the rubble of the World Trade Center. She is a spiritual and a sensual poet both, utterly honest and unafraid, capable of wonder yet grounded in compassion, writing from a tactile awareness of the body in all its grace and vulnerability. This is a steady gaze indeed.—Martín EspadaBOOK RELEASE CELEBRATION