Complex and focused, this collection of poems moves along the line between waking and sleeping to reveal a narrator who is contemplating her origins as well as her future. Pugh frequently turns in her work to the image of a bed--as a source of comfort, an erotic landing, and a place for dreaming. For Pugh, dreams both obscure and reveal, their language a code to be analyzed, as in her longer meditation inspired by Freud's case history "Dora." After dipping dangerously far into dreams, Pugh's poems return to a world of activity, full of physicality before becoming calm. At the end of the...

Complex and focused, this collection of poems moves along the line between waking and sleeping to reveal a narrator who is contemplating her origins as well as her future. Pugh frequently turns in her work to the image of a bed--as a source of comfort, an erotic landing, and a place for dreaming. For Pugh, dreams both obscure and reveal, their language a code to be analyzed, as in her longer meditation inspired by Freud's case history "Dora." After dipping dangerously far into dreams, Pugh's poems return to a world of activity, full of physicality before becoming calm. At the end of the...

Christina Pugh s Grains of the Voice exhibits a pervasive fascination with sound in all its manifestations. The human voice, musical instruments, the sounds produced by the natural and man-made worlds all serve at one time or another as both the framework of poems and the occasion for their lightning-quick changes of direction, of tone, of point of reference. The poems are eclectic in their allusiveness, filled with echoes and sometimes the words themselves of other poets, but just as often of songs both popular and obscure, of the noise of pop culture, and of philosophers writings. But...