“Empathy, tenderness, curiosity… a radiant book, her mind leaping free to show us the heart of things”
“Dale Kushner’s new book of poems has what her wonderful first novel, The Conditions of Love, also has: empathy, tenderness, curiosity, and an artist’s drive to understand and depict human suffering and joys in some of their many varieties. From the stunning violence of the first poem, which imagines the first coupling of the Bible’s first couple, to the quiet final poem, in which the poet crosses a darkening landscape toward ‘knowledge of dissolution’ and new life, Kushner’s passionate scrutiny animates every subject she touches. She is fearless, too, taking the risk, in the middle section of the book, of writing dramatic monologues in the voices of women from different countries and different centuries enduring wars and hurricanes and the savagery of men. She is a close observer of the human body (‘skin/like linen pounded over rocks’) and she writes about nature with a freshness that can make you smell it. Desire is said to surprise Kushner’s Mary Magdalene as she walks the hills of Galilee, contemplating the death of Jesus–desire ‘sharp as the juice of wild onions on her fingers.’ In the third and last section of the book, Kushner turns her gaze inward, toward her parents and her own childhood and, in a long and powerful poem called ‘One World,’ to a moment just before her conception. This moment is August 6, 1945, when America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and when the poet’s mother is at a New Jersey beach, watching a daughter build sand castles while wishing for a second child. Some decades later, this second daughter writes, in a moment of hope, ‘The mind leaps free without its winding sheet.’ Kushner has given us a radiant book, her mind leaping free to show us the heart of things.”
—Dwight Allen
