By Rita Kiefer
In Nesting Doll, Rita Brady Kiefer celebrates the ability of phrases to rework existence whereas exploring the mysterious methods reminiscence and language support form one another. all through twenty poems, Kiefer brilliantly explores the best way ladies and non secular matters interrelate, dealing with a good many mental subtleties comfortably and in ordinary verse. The identify poem, "Nesting Doll," is emblematic of ways we try to discover layers of character in an effort to observe what it capability to inhabit a human physique whereas whilst exist in a group. This seven-part poem locations at heart level girls from Kiefer's person heritage who resonate with girls from our personal. one other choice, a series of poems often called the "Sister Mailee Sequence," bargains a lyric standpoint at the poet's "previous existence" as a Catholic nun. this actual piece calls into query the permanence of vocation and examines unending probabilities of the relationships among an individual's religious and sensuous lives. the ultimate poem is an elegy for one of many 4 churchwomen murdered in El Salvador in 1980. no matter if the poems during this quantity originate from Marie Curie's thumbs ("near mindless from chemical substances [she used to be that during love with looking]"), a campus tree that retains returning ("4maybe5timescutdown"), or the voices of "my candy . . . diaphonous . . . dead," the photographs created depend upon the silences surrounding Kiefer's phrases up to what's articulated. even if reflecting tentative built human relationships or connections with the flora and fauna, this selection of poems embraces uncertainty as a fashion of being. Rita Brady Kiefer teaches within the division of English on the college of Northern Colorado. Her prior volumes of poetry contain UNVEILING (Chicory Blue Press) and making an attempt ON FACES (Monkshood Press), and her poems have seemed within the Bloomsbury overview, Ploughshares, Southern Poetry Review,Cimarron overview, Crosscurrents,High Plains Literary assessment, and somewhere else.