The dress of Inside the Yellow Dress is both the clothing of childhood, of girlhood in particular, and the garment of language we all put on. And like clothing, the poems are cut as though from cloth: here an armhole, here a sleeve, a cuff, and, finally, space where a body might go. Formally, the poems enact this interest in both fabric and lyric as they move across the page: the mind at work, language as desire and restraint, as loss and memory, as frontier. The page itself as the physical place where language lives. In Samyn's poems white space is not a surrender, but acknowledgment that...

Poetry. "Mary Ann Samyn writes poems in which the impossible happens--through language, the human experience is turned to sky, fire, fireworks, diamonds. This is a poet who is able to hijack sorrow, or error, or delight, and transform them into deeply imagined, perfectly condensed and terrifyingly expanded glimpses. One doesn't quit reading a Samyn poem, as they accumulate in the reader's mind, follow us like our own shadows, permanently. There's that much power. I find myself wondering what source it is this poet has tapped into--and how frightening and lovely it is that she has done so, so...