In Motherhouse, Kathleen Jesme takes the reader on a journey with a young novice through the heart of Mystery. Jesme's poems, which investigate religious life in a convent in the 1960s, are assembled from many fragments: juxtapositions of place and time (childhood and novitiate), shifting scale (the minuteness of an "old beige comb from home," the boundlessness of a "three-axled God"), and varying poetic forms. Jesme explores the hidden, the provisional, the silent -- that which does not obey the rules of the light or submit to its boundaries.

An intensely lyrical work, Motherhouse is a...