Who is Lilith? Is she the mythic first wife of Adam, who escaped subservience to her husband and her husband’s God and became stigmatized as a demoness? Or is she an ordinary woman preoccupied with gardening, cyberspace, irritation at the requirements of “pretty” and ready to choose herself? Does she know that sometimes “words stand in the way of their meaning?” Yes, yes and yes, in the poetry of Laura Madeline Wiseman’s First Wife, whose words are as lyrical, acerbic, and laden with meaning as an apple tree with apples.
– Alicia Ostriker
