Course

"The poems in Athena Kildegaard's Course contain multitudes: garter snakes, bats, herons, wild rhubarb, 'the thousand/reed-hidden/black-birds.' But their central concern surrounds the complex life and death of a mother, and attendant mourning for her. Trust and doubt coexist in these pages, and the natural world offers solace but never complete reassurance: 'How vain to seek certainty,' Kildegaard writes. Indeed, the book ends with a poem comprised of spacious questions. As readers, we are caught in the current of this marvelous book, which is as honest and deep-flowing and eternal as the river that passes through its pages"--Connie Wanek, author of Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems.