The Way Out dares to enter the many underworlds of human exsistance: that of Persephone, that of Dante, and that of contemporary life. At once dark and affirmative, the poems move from personal observation to personal disclosure, never averting their gaze from the face they are seeing. Lisa Sewell is the unusual poet who uses the confessional mode in the service of reflecting fully, and with fidelity, the moment in which we now find ourselves. Her bodies, faces, temperaments, resemble our own, and these poems are a record of what it means to be human and American in the last years of the twentieth century.