Down River

A haunting and harrowing collection of the inner life of a speaker, both as child and as adult, Down River contains, according to poet Mark Doty, "honest and startling poems that reveal themselves as acts of courage; meditations against 'dreaming darkness.'" This is a speaker who lives in the pain of childhood sexual abuse, the terror of mental illness, all within painful family secrets that haunt and "chronicle (s) the inner life of an adult," according to Doty. This "fractured self," writes poet Cynthia Huntington, allows the speaker's spirit to "affirm its own strength and integrity against what would break it." This "traumatic abuse," says poet Cynthia Hogue, creates a "haunting testimony of this powerful and necessary collection."