Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart

Book excerpt: Poetry. Winner of the 2009 Green Rose Prize in Poetry. "In a masterful work of startling possibilities, Markham layers gleaming phrases into a testimony to the world's particularities, which she reveals as also, paradoxically, eternal. Nothing here is limited by history, but instead attains the kind of simultaneity that drives myth. And like myth, her world is populated by creatures that mean, irreducibly, only themselves. Her ready attention to animals and birds is indicative of a compassion that demands of the world an inventive intelligence, and offers it one in return"--Cole Swensen.