Odessa

This collection is "an astonishing achievement" that renders grief and illness in "supremely lyrical, brilliantly imagined . . . poetry of the highest order" (Connie Wanek).

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick's Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the "emotional core of the self," and central to the process of memory.

In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what...