These Saints Are Stones

In Millie Tullis's new poetry collection, These Saints are Stones, a faithless daughter is haunted by her third-great-grandmother, Martha, a woman who married her stepfather at sixteen and became a sister-wife to her own mother. Tullis cannot stop uncovering details about Martha, who left no written history behind, and her silence permeates this collection, which is rife with gaps and fragments, scraps of memory that blend with dreams. Sparse and spare, these poems echo the red desert landscape where the speaker's ancestors lived and died, where she hunts for graves among the rocks and confronts a past she can never fully know. After all, like a sampling of lace, the cloth of women's history is more hole than thread.