From Publishers Weekly

With a direct, unembellished narrative style, a voice at once reserved and passionate, Becker ( Backtalk ) uses shifting geographical and emotional landscapes to consider the complexities of love, loss and relationships. Throughout the collection, the coffey/if you can say narrator when talking of poems, please switch this to narrator/speak used below/pk speakerspeaker? persona? attempts to come to terms with the ghosts of friends and family members who haunt these pages; she seeks to "learn the patience to live / alongside the dead who will not speak / and will not go away." For Becker, though the earth is "a lonely place, miles from anywhere," consolation can be found in art, nature, human sexuality and "faithfulness renewing itself / with each attention to one thing, and the next." She is at her best when using microscopic detail and apt particulars to magnify past and present moments and events, her poems quietly building to subtle, arresting epiphanies. But the book is uneven, as Becker's language and rhythms sometimes slacken, lapsing into the vague and prosaic.

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Robin Becker was born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned a B.A. and M.A. from Boston University and taught for seventeen years at the Massacusetts Institute of Technology.

She is the author of Domain of Perfect Affection, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); The Horse Fair (2000); All-American Girl (1996), which won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry; Giacometti's Dog (1990); Backtalk (1982); and Personal Effects (1977).

About her work, Stephen Dunn has said: "Robin Becker achieves what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn't pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection."

Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications such as American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her honors include the 1997 Virginia Faulkner Prize for Excellence in Writing from Prairie Schooner magazine and fellowships from the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

In addition to serving as Poetry Editor for The Women's Review of Books, Becker writes a column for the WRB on poetry and the poetry scene called "Field Notes." She is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.