Cloak

Red Hook, Brooklyn, is where these poems begin, in rough beginnings Dodici Azpadu does not soften. From there the collection follows her to the MFA programme at the University of Iowa, into the street life of San Francisco and the long emotional drought she endured there, and on to Albuquerque and the mountains of New Mexico, where her life is transformed.

The forms shift as the life does. Much of the book is in free verse, while many poems are wakas and other syllabic forms, bringing a counted, compressed music alongside the looser lines. It is the second title in the Margaret Randall Poetry Series. A quiet, hard-won collection for anyone drawn to poetry about a life pieced back together far from the centre of things.