How Many Miles to Babylon?

<p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>These clear-eyed haunting poems map complex and intertwining responses to the question </span></p><p><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Anne Pluto's collection poses about desire endurance and the search for home.  This journey en-compasses worlds: personal family histories the widow poet's grief and explorations of the politics and brutalities of war in particular regarding the experience of women who offer witness and example: from Isis to Hevrin Khalaf from Akhmatova to Szymborska.  In her poem Books Pluto reveals: . . . I carried/grammatic hope and the knowledge that women/are the ones who weave the remains of ruin . . .   Indeed.  These are unflinching poems of reckoning beauty and repair. -  </span><strong style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Mary Pinard</strong><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> author of </span><em style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Ghost Heart</em><span style=background-color: rgba(0 0 0 0); color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> (Ex Ophidia Press 2023)</span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p>