Anthem

Jean Donnelly. Sun and Moon Press, $11.95 (124pp) ISBN 978-1-55713-405-9

Unflinchingly rigorous and nuanced, Jean Donnelly's Anthem contains a poetry ""as real as this house,"" comprising some of the most riveting writing on motherhood (""mothers nibble a cold/ dinner at midnight// generations stamp the water/ with shots & breeds of rats"") since Alice Notley's Songs for the Unborn Second Baby. In four long pieces, two of them in prose, Donnelly asks and answers: ""Where's your hand. There's your hand. Jack in a sleeve makes it a hand. You can draft a poem.""

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