Having Witnessed the Illusion

Each poem in Nicole Greaves’ superb Having Witnessed the Illusion is a miracle of metaphor. Comparisons open into comparisons like petals from otherworldly flowers. Or are they simply the deep realities of an inner world we, her readers, are privileged to enter because Greaves’ work encourages us to live at greater depths? The acts of the imagination in Having Witnessed the Illusion are brilliant, at once fierce and strangely comforting. Behind their lyrical apprehensions a mother is dying. Simultaneously, children cavort, creating the slip and slide of generations-even as the language in the poems slips from English to Spanish and slides back again. Bursting with moments of discovery, here are poems a reader can turn to day by intensely lived day.

Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems