Night Halves

Christine Marshall's collection is a winner of the Dryden-Vreeland Prize from Gunpowder Press. "'Joy is seldom pure' we're told in Night Halves' very first poem, but reading this book is pure joy, even though it puts us face-to- face with the kinds of difficulties that can make a person describe herself as 'a glass box/slipping from the shelf.' There is childbirth ("Blind. Headlong"), the brain fog of brand-new motherhood ("There, there now. / Not a cloud in sight- / or is it all-cloud? / Never mind."), watching an aging parent disintegrate ("His teeth have turned so brittle, now / that night's unrolled its black tongue/in his mouth"), and the speaker's own precarious health ("Pretend I can / know whether I'm treading the past/or holding the future's hand"). These poems, born of acute honesty and deep observation, abound in exquisite descriptions and understated profundities, always keeping us aware that "The world is an equation, /the sky too slim to hold us all."-Jacqueline Osherow, Author of My Lookalike at the Krishna Temple: Poems"Rendered with an artist's eye, creating a powerful collection of lyrical meditations testing out what pain and grief will hold, the poet always on the edge of a 'sense of meaning / just beyond the field where I stand / with my boy.' Lovely. " -Glenn Freeman, Author of Drinking with O'Hara