Strong Medicine

This moving collection debuts Beatrice J. Krauss as a poet decades in the making. Her exceptional life fills this volume through the memories of those she has loved and championed. You are supposed to write about what you know, she says-so patients in the HIV epidemic are here, as are her parents and children, her fellow musicians and her harp, detained immigrant children, and her own childhood companions. Krauss’s poems treat enduring sadness with nature, art, friendship, and wicked humor: the strongest medicines she knows.