An evocotive tale of coming to womanhood in the disorienting 1960s-a girl in the world of nuns and the Holy Ghost-but on a deeper level, this is a story of a woman who has suffered unimaglnable loss and attempts to make sense of that loss by re-imagining her past and her own Irish-American heritage. The first in her family born in the United States, Maureen grew up the Bronx Irish daughter of two unforgettable immigrants: her storytelling, former revolutionary father, and her fierce, IRA-supporting mother. Crossing Higbbridge is framed by the accidental death of Waters's son and her struggle...

12-year-old Katie is injured in an accident that kills her parents. Unsure that she'll ever walk again, a horse appears and gives her life focus.

This is a book of some seventy lyric poems written in free verse. The bears, which appear in the title poem, are intended to suggest unpredictability, the mysterious and dangerous aspects of experience as well as the possibility of love. The poems are rooted in a changing landscape ranging from the Hudson River Valley to Manhattan, and further back in time, to the West coast of Ireland, from which the writer's parents emigrated. Arriving in New York in the twenties, they brought memories of famine and civil war as well as strong cultural values. The writer is haunted by their sense of another...