Our Lady of the Ruins: Poems (Barnard Women Poets Prize)

This is a startling and bold poetry collection about apocalypse, faith, and the female body. The language is evocative and colorful, and the stanzas bring up a progression of the world's decay.

Traci Brimhall's second collection is filled with unnerving beauty, doubt, and darkly idyllic imagery. Religious symbolism is obsessively apparent, filtered through a keen sense of Rilkean dread. This obsessiveness lends and itself to redundancy, and form and style often follow, which is a drawback to a book that contains a number of brilliant poems. If the imagery and the formal qualities with regard to syntax especially were more varied, the book would be spectacular.

I'm not an avid reader of poetry, nor am I a particularly fine judge of poetry, but I loved this collection. Haunting.