The Dark Mothers, by award-winning poet Michael Jennings, is the fourth in a series of extraordinary collections of poetry – including Summoning the Outlaws, Where She Dances, and The Moon’s Children – that constitute what Jennings describes as the last of a quartet of books that provide a rounding out, a sense of closure, of his prolific and brilliant poetic career. As Susan Deer Cloud affirms, the book is a tour de force of dream fire, poems unfolding as slow bluesy jazz riffs of memory and the kaleidoscopic music of time past, present, and future existing all at once, a poetry of bravery that dares to visit the mystery places, calling forth in an Ur-language poems often nearly unbearably poignant yet laced with flashes of humor and variations of light from subtle to intense. Michael Jennings is the author of 12 previous collections of poetry, among them Crossings: A Record of Travel, winner of the 2016 Central New York Book Award for Poetry, and River Time, winner of the 2014 Wells College Chapbook Contest. He is also the 2017 winner of the Miller Audio Award for Poetry.