I Don’t Need to Make a Pretty Thing

Poetry. Women’s Studies. Michelle Reed’s impressive debut, I DON’T NEED TO MAKE A PRETTY THING, is at once inquisitive, daring, and vulnerable as spirit clothed in the ordinary light of body, animated by a delight for living, by an abiding artistic honesty, and by the joy/fear in working closer toward what can be known. These poems embody an alert fidelity to form, shaped against a speculative consciousness, awake to music and to the pace of revelation, in an unflinching labor to trace and to translate a world–to ‘weigh its shadow / in dried lavender / and steel, ’–in learning to live and to love and to bravely claim one’s sovereignty against all the voices of the past. I will treasure this illuminated book.–Chad Sweeney