In Protection, Michelle Lerner explores the wonder and challenges of parenting from pregnancy through early childhood, taking on subjects rarely considered in poetry such as difficult labor, c-section, questions of gender identity and development in young children, and the experience of parenting while chronically ill. Throughout the chapbook, she comes back, over and over, to the eternal dilemma of how to balance the urge to protect one’s child with the acknowledgement of the child’s need for self-development and risk-taking, how to distinguish the you from the me/ the definition from destruction/ the stumble from the fall.

I love Lerner’s luminous imagery that fuses at times with an unexpected searing irony. Michelle Lerner is a new shimmering star on our poetry planet. -Laura Boss, author of The Best Lover, editor of Lips

These are beautiful lyric narratives that touch the heart. -Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American book award winner and poet

…the poems create a vivid and moving portrait of a life in our moment, written with vulnerability, insight, and a keen eye for fresh, revealing detail. -Jennifer Michael Hecht, Ph.D., author of Who Said