This is a beautiful and engaging collection. All of the poems are masterful. At the same time, many of these poems feel rather flat--more descriptive than whole with experience. I'll come back to some of them, but many of them are rather plain, so I probably won't be coming back to the collection as a whole. I can recommend it as a beautiful and complete collection, but on the whole, I wanted fresher work at many points, and marked only a half dozen or so poems that I'll revisit. ( )

Julia Kasdorf's poems deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the writer as she attempts to intergrate her Mennonite background and her new life in New York. As one who grew up in the Mennonite community, Julia Kasdorf's poetry evokes for me vivid images of our similar heritage. For those not familiar with this community, her poetry gives a glimpse of another way of life. Many of the poems are based on family stories, examining the history of her extended clan and its Mennonite and Amish community. The author's central themes are individual/community, outside/inside, city/county, profane/sacred, and female/male. With these universal themes, her poetry resonates with readers who are atempting to integrate past and present. Her writing is direct, frank and open -- somewhat unusual for Mennonite poets. Her poems have the capacity to resonate and move the reader to new understanding --important aspects of good poetry.