cover image Wild with It

Wild with It

Aliki Barnstone. Sheep Meadow Press, $12.95 (76pp) ISBN 978-1-878818-93-5

Rural American ecstasies, religious litanies loosely modeled on psalms, the joys and anxieties of gestation and motherhood, and erotic fulfillment all find voice in the winning, sometimes ingenuous poems of Aliki Barnstone's Wild with It. Barnstone's locales range from Greece to Manhattan to the rural Midwest, her forms from Whitmanesque free verse to a well-turned ghazal; the prolific poet, translator and anthologist (Madly in Love; Voices of Light) does best when she explores all her subjects at once, considering sex during pregnancy, for example, or offering ""passion in a flame dress,/ caress of silk falling away.""