Lisa Russ Spaar

I often avoid anthologies that bring together older works with newer ones, simply because the same poems tend to get reprinted over and over again. This book found me as a gift or I probably wouldn't have picked it up, but really, I was pleasantly surprised. The focus of the theme led the editor to choose older poems that aren't so well-known, even where the authors most certainly are, so there were few poems here that I'd read in the past. I did find it to be somewhat uneven--the poems in show more the first half of the book felt more various and kept me more engaged than the later part of the work, but all in all, I enjoyed wandering my way through it. show less