Woman at the Crossing

In the poem that opens her debut collection, Susan Okie recounts an evening in the anatomy lab. Here we witness the depths of her curiosity toward her subject's inner workings. When I tugged on the flexor digitorum tendons, / her fingers partly closed and her thumb /crooked in. I seemed to see the two of us / as if from outside, and could no longer / name the tendons. I felt my fingers / from inside her hand." What to some might feel like harrowing proximity, Okie delivers, in astonishing verse, with wonder and even intimacy. To be sure, Woman at the Crossing is the work of a seasoned practitioner.