ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to the editors of the following journals and anthologies, in which these poems appeared, often in earlier versions:

Antioch Review: “My Mother as Penelope” (as “Penelope”), “Ghazal”

Caribbean Review of Books: “Blue Song,” “The Fall”

Connotation Press: An Online Artifact: “Miss Sally on Love”

Crab Orchard Review: “At the Hanover Museum”

Green Mountains Review: “My Mother as Persephone” (as “Persephone in Darkness”), “Domestic Interior”

Great River Review: “Penelope”

Harvard Review: “A Grammar for War”

Image: “The News”

Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Development: “Dear Hours”

Kestrel: “The Border”

LUNA: “The Shore,” “Luck,” “Parable of the Stones”

MARGIE: The American Journal of Poetry: “Diva”

Mid-American Review: “Dear History” on page 21

New England Review: “Gravid Gravitas”

Ploughshares: “History is a Room”

Prairie Schooner: “Dear History” on page 7, “Palisadoes” (as “Primer”), “The Pastoral Yielding to History,” “Mother and Child,” “Miss Sally on the Grandmother Fires”

Smartish Pace: “The Mermaid” (as “The Mother”), “A Room,” “Miss Sally on Politics,” “Election Days, Kingston” (as “Election Days”), “Miss Sally Explains,” “Miss Sally and Fowl Run”

The Southern Review: “Psalm for Kingston”

Triquarterly: “From the Book of Mothers”

Tygerburning: “My Mother as Narcissus,” “Blackberries,” “October 2008”

Virginia Quarterly Review: “Couple at the Shore” (as “Under Water”)

Zone 3: “Seagrape”

“Dear History” on page 24 is a revision of three separate poems, all titled “Dear History,” which appeared individually in Crab Orchard Review and Prairie Schooner.

The first section of “Dear Hours” appeared as a separate poem, “For Rachel, Just before Speech,” in Image.

“The Waves” appeared in Evensong: Contemporary American Poems on Spirituality (Bottom Dog Press, 2006).

“Election Days, Kingston” (as “Election Days”), “Dear History” on page 7, and “Mother and Child” also appeared in New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (Carcanet Press, UK, 2007).

“Dear History” on page 7, “Election Days, Kingston,” and “At the Hanover Museum” also appeared in the online poetry anthology, Enskyment.

“Dear History” on page 7 and “Mother and Child” were translated into Spanish and appeared in Poetas del Caribe Inglés: Antología, v.2 (El perro y la rana, Venezuela, 2009).

“Dear History” on page 24 also appeared in Review 81: Bob Marley and His Legacy (2010).

Thank you to Bucknell University for a leave that enabled me to write some of these poems.

Above all, I am grateful to and for my husband Steven Shwartzer, who made writing this book possible, and my daughters Rachel and Naomi. Thanks always to my other family members and friends for their love and support. Deepest gratitude to Paula Closson Buck, Terrance Hayes, and Mia Leonin, for their countless readings of these poems, and to everyone at Alice James Books, particularly Mihaela Moscaliuc, Carey Salerno, and Julia Bouwsma.