Scranton Lace by Margot Douaihy combines tremendous lyric gifts-dense, nervy music, evocative images, an almost classically tragic sense of life’s doomed blooming-with a gritty vernacularity that roots these poems in the rusted factory life of the title. Often formally playful but always brimming with emotion, using repetition in ways that evoke the ghostly graphics of lace woven through the book. Douaihy sings poetry’s repertoire of love, loss, time and trial in keys that are wholly her own. -Joy Ladin Margot Douaihy’s Scranton Lace is a gorgeous meditation on place, on where we came from and what shapes and makes us. She speaks for anyone who’s ever been too scared to go ‘into the unknown, & … too scared not to.’ This book immerses us into the beautiful and broken parts of ourselves in gorgeously-crafted, soul-showing poems. -Aaron Smith In Scranton Lace, Douaihy unpacks an intimate gay American past, layers it like an essay, complicates it with detail, cool, big images, memory, loss and slippage, so that back in the present, we can learn again what difficulty, privacy and history a person is, and how tender, profound and unlikely, our connections can be. -Jack Underwood