The Bride Minaret

eather Derr-Smith's second collection journeys to the rough core of desire, creating and destroying binaries along the way. Familiar artifacts of domesticity become as volatile as land mines, and the streets of Damascus, Calcutta, and other faraway locales obliterate the American landscape. Yet Derr-Smith's poetry transcends time and place, illuminating the ties that bind man to woman, mother to child. A young son's purposeful breaking of a bowl hurls the speaker back to the unconnected shards of her past. An everyday scene outside an elementary school expands into a soulful meditation on the nature of violence and grief. The Bride Minaret is a relentless chronicle of experience, where the sacred and profane become interchangeable, where "Every tent has a name, and every name is the breath of you."