With heartbreaking insight, Sarah McKinstry-Brown tells of Demeter and Persephone as the story of a mother who has lost her daughter to male violence. These plainspoken, elegant poems give voice to tomboys, girls coming into their sexual power, their mothers and grandmothers, newscasters unspooling the latest version of the ‘gone girl’ narrative, pregnant women, mothers who miscarry, and flowers who give advice. In crystalline verse, McKinstry-Brown shows us girls like ‘peonies / hanging their heads under the weight / of their own blossoming, ’ and women who learn that ‘the heart becomes offal / when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren.’ THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS is the meditation and the medicine we need as we confront male violence in our current moment.

-Lisa L. Moore

Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown’s THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment. McKinstry-Brown writes of a time ‘when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren, warning, a story to be taught.’ And isn’t this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake.

-Stacey Waite