When Numbers Breathe. (Original poems)

For the past several years, while working on my poetry, I have pursued the other work of earning a living; the other work is maintenance and the poems have been the real work. It is an unfortunate truth that unless one is born wealthy, plays the stock market with alarcity and luck, or wins the lottery, one spends almost a quarter of one's adult life working. Many people come to define themselves in terms of that work: butcher, baker, candlestick maker (or doctor, lawyer, banker). Often, however, attention to this kind of work distracts us from the real work of living: the work of family, the work of love and domesticity, the work of change and of loss, and of being human. This collection is an exploration of that real work; of poems about family, about husbands and other loves, about loss and change. The final section, "Calculation and Despair," explores these themes in the contexts of a nineteenth-century Russian's life. In either case, the poems mean to explore what it is to be a woman, living and working during the end of the twentieth century.