Poems consider love, work, and the demands of everyday life.

Nine years after the stunning debut of her critically acclaimed poetry collection A Working Girl Can't Win, which chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young woman, Deborah Garrison now moves into another stage of adulthood-starting a family and saying good-bye to a more carefree self.
In The Second Child, Garrison explores every facet of motherhood-the ambivalence, the trepidation, and the joy ("Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness, / The globe already set aspin, particular / Of a whole new life")- and comes to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in...