¿I'm learning to allow for visions,¿ the primary speaker of The Trailhead announces, setting out through a landscape populated by swan-killers, war torturers, and kings. Much of the book takes place in the contemporary American West, and these poems reckon with the violence inherent in that history. A ¿conversion narrative¿ of sorts, the book examines the self as a ¿burned-over district,¿ individual and cultural pain as a crucible in which the book¿s sibyls and spinsters are remade, transfigured. Sacralization/is when things become holy, also/when vertebrae fuse," the book tells us, pulling at the tensions between secular and sacred embodiment, exposing the essential difficulty of being a speaking woman. The collection arrives at a taut, gendered calling¿a firm faith in the power and worth of the female voice¿and a broader faith in poetry not as a vehicle of atonement or expiation, but as bulwark against our frailties and failings.

KERRI WEBSTER is the author of the poetry collections We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone and Grand & Arsenal, the latter of which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. The recipient of awards from the Whiting Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, she was a Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006-2010. She currently teaches at Boise State University.