Lizzie Hutton

continued

She writes vividly of natural images, as in her description of a milkweed pod "now broken open echoingly // like the belly / of a lute // that lets loose some stray / wind-born notes, // the source now shredded, summer-torn." Although we can't re-create the look of that poem as it dances irregularly around the page, the words capture some sense of its play. But I think Lizzie Hutton and the poems in this first book are best when she combines her strengths of sound and description to come to some understanding of the place she is writing from. "Marriage has," she writes:

a beautiful, thickety sameness,

like the barely

dripping constant rain in our boxed backyard, its wet

branches with its few clinging leaves spiraling slowly in