In this striking and nostalgic collection, Emily Rose Cole unearths the fragility and resilience of daughterhood through indelible imagery that evokes new senses of the body: swallowing keys, rain lashing eyelids, unzipping of flesh. Grieving self-portraits of historical and mythological women are woven with stirring recollections of struggling bodies and evocative spells to overcome them. Undulating with memories and magic, illness and death, these poems reveal how a single chance at life and loving can be both too much and not enough. Her bed,from this angle, looks like an altar. Isaiah, when you wrote, The wolf will live with the lamb, what did you mean? Some days, cancer is the wolf. Some days, the wolf is Mama. —excerpt from “Still Life with Lines from Isaiah”
