My Florida

Kathleen Tyler’s Florida is a wild and terrifying place, a savage place-but what was savage, I adored, she tells us. And so these poems are full of the deepest kind of heartbreak, too, the kind of heartbreak that’s irreparable. Death cures of our terror/of death, Tyler writes, What cure is there for the terror of love? In My Florida, a hubcap scuds across the road, a child hides under an ironing board while her mother is beaten, a heron with orange eyes feasts on hatchling alligators, and a girl swings a bag of snakes tied with a pink, satiny ribbon, asking, Oh, whose porch can I leave it on? Tyler’s poems are often shocking, always brave, and bravely, shockingly beautiful. Cecilia Woloch