Kraus's second collection is a moving meditation on the possibility of redemption after a history of abuse, picking up where her debut, Generation, left off—with the speaker's trepidant plunge into marriage. Psychological acuity abounds in the speaker's emotional responses to "tethering," to prospective motherhood (evoking the inherited memory of her own mother's "punch[ing] through the membrane/ of each condom, using a safety pin, the not really star shaped/ portals") and to her place within her city and within her new family: "I know/ these people are not mine; I know someday Brian/ may turn his back." Kraus does not shy away from the narcissism that she finds within her speaker's struggles with her past and fears about the future; the book's social imagination tests the limits of urban empathy via worries, in one poem, about a pigeon trapped in the subway: "One eye looks at the left world,/ one looks at the right, and then everything is flat/ and there are twice as many dangers. For example,/ wanting to rescue the bird./ For example, not wanting to rescue the bird." Aware that it is difficult to make poetry of such moments ("I know it's too easy/ to worry about a bird"), Kraus, throughout the collection, avoids false notes with a careworn knowingness. The book's final section, which takes readers from "the EPT stick," through the first months of pregnancy and its generational reckonings ("the sort of message/ I'm a sucker for"), to ultrasound and immanent motherhood, sets us up for the next installment, which fans of Sharon Olds or Marie Howe should begin to await. (Apr. 15)
