Making Maxine’s Baby

Poetry. Smart, empathetic poems… MAKING MAXINE’S BABY is a gorgeous book, eminently readable, full of surprises.–Elisabeth Frost

Tracking her flight from the hell of feeling, Caroline Hagood’s metaphors unfold with a desperado’s inventiveness. Reeling with the book’s unexpected turns, I’m reminded of Dickinson’s razor-sharp observations of her own psyche and of Plath’s acerbic wit. For all the diversity of its escape routes, MAKING MAXINE’S BABY reads like a single utterance. It wills us to train our attention not on the traumatic violation at the poems’ source, but on the loneliness, wild creativity, and valor of survival.–Joan Larkin