Like the favorite daughters of a Sufi master, these liberating poems love contradiction and whirling, and intimacy--their seriousness is droll, their humor warm and dark, their fables of selfhood are teasing and honest in marvelous and uncommon ways. They are truly delightful and robustly original--a poetic joy.--Tony Hoagland

Selected by Bernadette Mayer for the National Poetry Series, these poems engage the structures of family and intimacy, exposing the viscera of the everyday, all its frailties and familiarity rendered absurd and remade through language.

Outside there's a world where every love-scene
begins with a man in a doorway;
he walks over to the woman and says Open your mouth.

Hannah Gamble has received fellowships from Rice University, The University of Houston, and The Edward F. Albee Foundation. She teaches literature and writing at Prairie State College and is the poet-in-residence at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago, Illinois.