"I'm learning to allow for visions," the primary speaker of The Trailhead announces, setting out through a landscape populated by swan-killers, war torturers, and kings. Much of the book takes place in the contemporary American West, and these poems reckon with the violence inherent in that history. A "conversion narrative" of sorts, the book examines the self as a "burned-over district," individual and cultural pain as a crucible in which the book's sibyls and spinsters are remade, transfigured. Sacralization/is when things become holy, also/when vertebrae fuse," the book tells us, pulling at the tensions between secular and sacred embodiment, exposing the essential difficulty of being a speaking woman. The collection arrives at a taut, gendered calling-a firm faith in the power and worth of the female voice-and a broader faith in poetry not as a vehicle of atonement or expiation, but as bulwark against our frailties and failings.

Book Information
ISBN 9780819578112
Author Kerri Webster
Format Hardback
Page Count 90
Imprint Wesleyan University Press
Publisher University Press of New England