When I Think on Your Lives

Tara Kainer is a writer who pulls no punches - deeply self-examining, she takes on the natural world, love, war, and poverty, and insists on a human response, a recognition of meaning. From the beauty of the "spun-butter moon" to the rages of the welfare office, from the wide prairie landscape to the many storms of mind and heart, these poems ask essential questions of identity, judgement, and the weight of past experience - "all those versions/of yourself imposed on you by others." Interpreting crows' caws or the cacophony of war coverage, her attempts to "know what things are" are bracing and beautiful. She invokes David Suzuki, Ezra Pound, and "the poets/whose truth seeps through/the cage of the printed word." Kainer's poems articulate a singular, uncompromising voice "measuring the light of my mind/by the light of those stars," a reminder of human decency and the importance of the place of the poet: both "to get at the truth, if it's possible" and "to be such a fool/for beauty."