Tributary Poems

Tributary tells the heartbreaking story of family fracture–of sisters’ estranged, a brother excommunicated. Arranged as a church service, in tension with the ubiquitous, mythic river that floods their landscape, these fierce and urgent poems seek to expose the struggles and failings of family and faith, the rigidity of conditional love and loyalty. As they do, they mirror our national systemic crises of Islamophobia, sexism, gun violence, fanatical religiosity, and white nationalism. In Tributary, a woman rejects the laws of the “book of truth” that she is raised under in order to discover and claim her own morality.