Rebecca Cook / The Terrible Baby

 "In Rebecca Cook’s intense and powerful poems we encounter “an uproar of wings beating glossy flying straight through the body,” what Gaston Bachelard describes as “intimate immensity,” the way the body reflects the cosmos, and object the world around it, the inner world the outer world. In this finely wrought world, Cook can “Take down the bluebird wing and bring it home. / That piece of sky hanging over the water by / threads, the moon reflected in the bathtub.” What’s at stake here is not only the family history, but the notion of how we see ourselves, how we define our worlds that always seem “full of voices.” This is a poet fully conscious of “whatever might slip past and pull me under” and so also a poet who makes us aware, in this terrific collection, of what might pull us under. And it’s that awareness that saves us in the end so that we can, with her, “sing and sing." -Richard Jackson "First, there is the sheer music of it / snapped empty knuckles tight / and then we realize