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Winner, The Isabella Gardner Poetry Award For 1997

The poems of Laurie Kutchins take us down The Night Path, a trail that is not so much a place as it is a way of being acutely present in the moment. Patient and receptive, Kutchins crafts poems that see far into, and subsequently ennoble, all things corporeal, all things evanescent. Kutchins writes of pregnancy, birth and the complicated relationship between mother and child like no other contemporary American poet. In language both playful and sober, she mixes lyrics with narratives and dramatic monologues. In the poem, "Milk," the liquid itself speaks: "Given your birth, I am the glue of the cosmos. Love, I am/what you, puts you to sleep, keeps you going./I am fluid matter, essential as swallows/of air...So charged is my love, when I hear you cry I surge toward you like an electrical current." " A new vista opens in the poems Laurie Kutchins writes about pregnancy and birth. The are concrete and lyrical, factual and wildly speculative." Maxine Kumin