Traci Brimhall undergoes a similar journey in her second book, Our Lady of the Ruins, but largely in reverse. Winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize, this is another second book with ambition; Brimhall has crafted a myth made of women's voices, with "we" coursing through many of the poems. The book's "Music From a Burning Piano" is by turns complex, incantatory, even surreal — exploring birth, death, prayer, war and "Jubilee." The result is not so much a narrative as a

—Kevin Young