Dogged Hearts

Poetry. In her fifth collection of poems, Ellen Dore Watson lends her supple voice to a multiplicity of characters, each with his or her own particular dilemma, distraction, or disarray: Junie biking home to find a new mom, Edur wondering whether he's anyone's father, a pregnant teen starving herself to lose the fetus, or the widower Lew buoyed by a vision of his wife after her death. With a novelist's finesse and a poet's details, Watson creates lives that resonate with poignancy and urgency. "These intensely lyrical, very physical poems batter their way forward, embodiments of the struggle to keep emotionally alive; Dogged Hearts reminds us why the arts are called the humanities: because they remind us how to be human"--Tony Hoagland.