The Unbecoming: Poems

A dazzling meditation on the limits of life from a poet whose “mind is endless with depth and truth” (Brenda Shaughnessy).

On a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to Draw faster, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death—and art—far longer.

As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognizing the limits of her own life and that of our planet, Kathy Fagan has immersed herself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth a...