In four sections, the poet unleashes the visions of an imaginative journey, blazing through the pages of this collection: “The Kudzu Chronicles,” “Berthe Morisot: Retrospective,” and a series of dream songs. Her world expanded by an open heart and open mind, this poet never, never disappoints, always leaves me filled with the pure joy of language that expands the boundaries of my experience.

In the first group of narratives she touches on the familiar, the solid emotional connections that allow her imagination to spar, the earthiness of love, family, home, a safe place to return again and again:

“When in our most romantic, most expensive meal,
you laid your sunburned hand upon your heart,
it was just to check your phone was on.”

- (Souvenir)

“I paint outdoors all day. When I return,
she gives me cut lemons
to rub the freckles from my hands,

My fingers twitch in sleep, she says - even in my dreams I paint.”

- (Colorplate 7)

“before I was a mommy
say four or five years or
decades ago I could think in complete sentences remember all…

who was she
that fresh-squeezed girl
merely temporarily out of her mind

if it’s true as they say
that I am now
the same as she”

- (The Mommy at the Zoo)

“Kudzu sallies into the gully
like a man pulling up a chair
where a woman was happily dining alone.
Kudzu sees a field of cotton,
wants to be its better half…

Why fret
if all it wants
is to lay one heart -
shaped palm
on your sleeping back?”

“One forget the kudzu’s
Avalanche, and that’s
When it makes its snatch -

If you need to dump a body,
do it here.”