This collection is a potent elixir. It is not for everyone to sip but it will surely connect with those who have endured losses, betrayals, shocking reversals of fortune.

The underlying narrative is that of a bright and brave woman, suddenly clip-winged, who tries to launch herself into the air and falls. She reels from buffeting winds that she can no longer defy; she becomes tied to gravity. The weight of it presses her down, binds her to a tower from which flight seems impossible. Circumscribed, pacing hopeless, while others jangle the keys. Her only option is to leap and drop - or endure and plot her escape.

But in the end, plumage grows back. Wings strengthen. Prisoned damsels figure out the combination to the lock and flee to freedom. They find strength to abandon those who have already abandoned them. And they secure their own safety in a place where no one can ever cage them again.

The poem Chimera knocks everything sideways. Cells of previous uterine tenants are left behind within the mother, not allowed to remain with their fetal source and grow to maturity. Physically, not to mention emotionally, every biological mother is a combination of herself and the infants she has borne. Science has recently affirmed this cellular migration from pregnant womb to maternal brain. Wordsworth was right! "The child is father of the man" (or mother of the woman).

This book compels both reader and writer to meld for the duration, transform into our own chimerical being.

Like its author, we become the woman scorned, the hostess of our children's cells. We become the hawk shrugging off her jesses and embracing whatever means she can find to feed her own survival. We must all learn to draw blood without regret. We can shake the night from [our] wings and take the opposite direction from where we began - widdershins, a willingness to force our path against whatever currents might have roiled from the actions of others. A release from the turret! We will never again return to it.

This is bold and memorable writing. Few poets could write anything remotely like it. Few could even dare attempt it. We lack the potency. We lack the language. I couldn't look away once I opened the book. But now I want to order a spare set of house keys - and hide them well.

Brenda Levy-Tate,

Author of Cleansing (Rising Tide Press 2005), Beeline (Lopside Press 2007), and Wingflash (The Pink Petticoat Press, 2011)