Equipoise: Poems from Goddess Country

Shonda Buchanan

POETRY

"Shonda Buchanan’s Equipoise belongs on shelves with both feminist and mythological volumes. It moves the reader back and forth between a kind of fever-dream swamp mist and a recognizable contemporary America — with wisps of the primeval mist continuing to cling to the familiar present. In a ravenous attempt to absorb and render the power and essence of Woman, these sensual, violent, archetypal poems stretch the marveling mind from Eve to Ethiopia, from Magdala to Medusa, from Hathor to Harlem, from Delphi to a desert in Arizona. These are poems of blood— sacrificial, menstrual, sacerdotal, and, finally, familial.

Ron Smith.
Poet Laureate of Virginia, 2014-2016
Author of Moon Road, Its Ghostly Workshop, and The Humility of the Brutes