Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Aileen Wuornos. A witch, a pirate, a slave who poisoned her master. A serial killer, a Quaker, a case of mistaken identity. The earliest to be electrocuted, gassed, and lethally injected; the last to be publicly hanged. In her first book, Habeas Corpus, acclaimed poet Jill McDonough gives us fifty sonnets, each about a legal execution in American history. From four hundred years of documentation she conjures - and honors - a chorus of the dead.The sonnets, headed meticulously by name, date, and place, are poignant with the factual, with words and...

Jill McDonough's frank, funny, and tender second book offers each day fresh with the gift of it. Fierce/nose-sting of tears, quick breath out of nowhere. In love-poems, conversations, intimate jokes, from a hundred parties, five prisons, and three beloved bars, McDonough helps you better see "Where You Live."