The Piercing: Poems

　　The Piercing celebrates the here and now while endorsing a deep faith in the necessity of the imagination. In response to life in a literal world, Christine Garren's lyric poems ignite belief in exhilaration. Ordinary settings—a park, a pond, a littered vacant lot, an attic room—through Garren's eyes reveal something extraordinary. For example, in "February Snow," the poet surveys a winter scene through the windows of various rooms and reflects how "Sometimes it is beautiful, in some of the minutes / then ordinary again— / . . . that feeling / of air in the midst of burial." In "The Well," she writes of reaching an impasse in a relationship: "The exhilarating life is finished. We must accept it / this late afternoon and move / back into the rational world." Spare, quiet, visual distillations of the physical and emotional dimensions of the moment define The Piercing with a driving energy at once delicate and fierce.