The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid's Tale "brings a swift, powerful energy" to this "intimate and immediate" poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).
These beautifully crafted poems—by turns dark, playful, tender, and intensely moving—come together as Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering of poems to date, "setting foot on the middle ground/between body and word." Some draw on history, and on myth, both classical and popular.
Other, more personal poems concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death—especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent—as they inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past.Through these poems, Atwood seeks a balance between the luminous realm of memory and the realities of everyday, between darkness and light, the capacity to perpetrate and the strength to forgive.