A poetry collection from Louise Erdrich, winner of America's prestigious National Book Award for Fiction, 2012

The poems of Louise Erdrich eloquently and passionately bring to life what it is to be a woman, a Midwesterner, and a Native American. She presents that region and those people without sentimentality but with a powerful magic. Although she often draws from a deep enchanted well, she does not ignore the ordinary.

One sequence of poems presents a small town in the early part of this century and Mary Kroger, the butcher's widow. Mary lives within the shadows of her memories, the pulse of her desires and the pragmatic surface of her commonplace days in the centre of a town awash with gossip, commerce and lust.

Other poems draw from images so ripe they become myth, signs and directions the visible world offers up in its great repetitions. Louise Erdrich writes with conviction and vision; her poetry speaks with a clarity and strength we cannot ignore.