How quietly the heart breaks, almost soundlessly, or with a sound like a piano being played by some lost love, somewhere in a city that might be Paris, the notes flicked by the wind and falling at a woman's feet like little threats. In these poems, Suzanne Allen imbues grief with a kind of magic, loss with a kind of shadow music all its own. So that we're glad to have been broken, too, because we've also been transformed. -- Cecilia Woloch
