GLOCK

Annmarie O'Connell's Glock is savage and street-wise, delineating a world punctured by addiction, poverty and intimate violence, in a voice that cuts to the truth of human experience like a switchblade. These poems are urgent, necessary, and ferociously oracular, with moments of unlikely grace punching through like a "fist among stars." I won't soon forget them.

- Paula McLain

author of The Paris Wife and When the Stars Go Dark

This is a book where you will see grief and light, and know that there are "fistfuls of loss," and there are "dirt beds," but in the end you will find hope because "this morning's light / gives you a certain gentleness /over the long slope of your nose." The lyric tilt of these poems is no easy thing to achieve. They are daring, they sparkle, blaze, and they remind us that "a shaft of sunlight enters the earth / the way death enters us / so miraculously inside." The knowledge such miracles is in itself a miracle, found in grief. How to go on with it? Why? Because, perhaps, as the author admits, "the baby's asleep beside me." These are beautiful, revealing poems.

- Ilya Kaminsky

author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa