Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following publications in which these works or earlier versions of them previously appeared:
Alaska Quarterly Review: “Why People Murder”;
The Beloit Poetry Journal: “I Love the Way Men Crack”;
Bridges: “Guilt”;
Comstock Review: “Tigers and People”;
DoubleTake: “Jack Gottlieb’s in Love”;
Field: “God and the G-Spot,” “His Teeth”;
The Greensboro Review: “Marriage Without Sex,” “Pay for It”;
Kalliope: “Birds Do It,” “Everything on the Menu”;
Mangrove: “Poem to My Sex at Fifty-One”;
The Missouri Review: “And What If I Spoke of Despair”;
Nimrod: “Can’t Get Over Her,” “Mighty Strong Poems,” “Phone Therapy”;
The Paterson Literary Review: “Backdoor Karaoke,” “If,” “Sleeping Next to the Man on the Plane”;
Porter Gulch Review: “Laundry”;
Piedmont Literary Review: “In My Hands”;
Quarry West: “Sometimes, After Making Love”;
Red Rock: “The Moon”;
Sojourner: “Getting My Hands on My Mother’s Body,” “The Sad Truth,” “Working in the Garden”;
The Sun: “Worry”;
Tribes: “Remodeling the Bathroom”;
Women’s Studies Quarterly: “If There Is No God”;
ZYZZYVA: “Tulip Blossoms.”
“Bearing Witness” appears in Like Thunder: Poets Respond to Violence in America (University of Iowa Press); “Sometimes, After Making Love” appears in Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure (New World Library); “For My Daughter on Her Twenty-First Birthday” appears as “Mules of Love” in Baby Blessings: Prayers and Poems Celebrating Mothers and Babies (Harmony Books); “The Thing Is” appears in Bedside Prayers (HarperCollins), Bless the Day (Kodansha), and Prayers for a Thousand Years (HarperSan Francisco); “After Our Daughter’s Wedding” and “God and the G-Spot” appear in Women Artists Datebook (Syracuse Cultural Workers).
“Can’t Get Over Her,” “Mighty Strong Poems,” and “Phone Therapy” were selected for the 2000 Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod/Hardman.
“And What If I Spoke of Despair” was selected for the 2002 Larry Levis Editor’s Prize for Poetry from The Missouri Review.
My sincere gratitude to all my students, teachers, and friends, with special thanks to Florence Howe, Lucy Diggs, Michael Ponsor, and Charlotte Raymond for early and continuing support; to Sharon Olds for the right words at the right time; to Kim Addonizio, Joe Millar, and Thorn Ward for generous and insightful critique; and most of all, to Dorianne Laux, without whom my poems would still be in their pajamas, sipping coffee, trying to wake up.