The Raiment We Put On

Kelly Cherry takes on what few contemporary poets are willing to: the ways and hows of human existence, in both personal and historical terms. Tonally and technically, she has a wide range, being capable of writing touchingly intimate love poems on the one hand and treating natural objects with scientific precision on the other. The common denominator is the sensibility of a poet for whom all human perceptions, whether of inner experience or external things, turn into metaphor; that is to say, a language of meaning through connection. —Lisel Mueller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize