How the Crimes Happened

DAWN POTTER is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Her most recent book is a memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton. She lives in Harmony, Maine, with photographer Thomas Birtwistle and their two sons.

"John Keats might have been writing to Dawn Potter when he said, 'There is nothing stable in the world; uproar's your only music.'... these poems tackle the commotion of life: flip-flopping love (constant only in its thorny complications); glorious yet ignoble parenthood; and pitiless death, robbing us of our finest poets and closest friends." MEG KEARNEY "This poet's relationship to language is nearly physical in its intensity. Fearless and headlong, these poems sing in service to love, loss, and hope... a poem in memory of a dead friend recounts the list of things they had planned to get done: 'sing like angels on moonshine, like fire, like sin.' And she does." ELLEN DUDLEY"