Dresses from the Old Country

In Laura Reads second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mothera woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Reads poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing dresses from the old country.