With nods to fairy tales, mythology, and Emily Dickinson, Wake imagines a female Death, both tender and brutal, at one moment the hand “pushing hair behind my ear” and at the next the sexual aggressor who “tries to maneuver my lips to steal my breath, / to give me the tongue she doesn’t have.” In Wake, the underworld is “a symbol of what can’t be / faced direct without a dying, but we face it dying.” Emerging from that place, the poems’ narrators meet monsters both fantastic and familial and discover not only lurking threats but also the possibility of laughter after death.
– Jennifer Perrine
