Every Ravening Thing

Every ravening thing, the "salt sting…all the shame," settles acutely into focus in this third collection of brutally honest, emotionally searing poems for our times from multi-award-winning de la O (Antidote for Night). Here the poet Enheduanna of Uruk grieves her lost city and "ruined heart" in a final, liberating act of defiance—"Her limbs start up in a concord of fire and water and her hand picks up the stylus, this chance to sing back to the world." In "The Essence of Water," a contemplative speaker unmoored by unnamed sorrow turns to nature and the writings of the Upanishads—"What would be enough to enter the peace of oaks?/ …to touch the hem,…/ a way to say yes—let touch teach me." Elsewhere, "Words boil forth like a nest of ants," as a Congolese woman recounts her rape by Mai-Mai or Hutu soldiers ("she never knew" which) and subsequent exile by her husband, even as she soothes her sobbing child: "O little one, hush; hush now thy lamentations."