Habeas Corpus (Salt Modern Poets)
Jill McDonough's poems are lyrical founts of energy and insight and humor and empathy. She's a daring poet, formally sophisticated yet pushing the boundaries of form at every turn. In the four or five years I've known her poems, their subjects have dazzled me: a bumptious American girl teaching in Japan and loving the language, a gorgeous exotic dancer in a local club, really tender love poems, really tough (what else?) Catallus translations, and a long sonnet sequence about murderers who've been executed throughout American history. I want to follow the trajectory of McDonough's work, its twists and turns--it will never fail to be interesting--Gail Mazur author of "They Can't Take That Away from Me"