Girl Paper Stone

In her luminous book, Laurie Filipelli remakes the constellations of a modern life. Her poems re-draw the lines between the parts of the world, helping us to see there are no divisions between planting a plumbago and watching the passage of hateful legislation, no space between grief for a lost father and the wonder of what he's told the speaker: 'the whale's veins are so wide we could swim / to her heart.' By looking so tenderly and incisively at the actual experience of a life, Filipelli makes us see our own differently --Sasha West