Instructions for Use

Instructions for Use is an unflinching, elegantly crafted debut collection of intensely smart, deeply observant poems, by turns tender and brutal: a meditation on what it means to carry a body with its physical and psychic scars through time. With beauty, humor, and an acrid toughness tonally bringing to mind Louise Glück as well as Henri Cole, Arlene DeMaris writes of perseverance in the face of loss, inheritance and loneliness, childlessness and grief, mortality and the wonderful, ferocious awe of being alive.

-Michael Dumanis