My grandmother didn't waste anything. The tops and bottoms of carrots, the ends of celery, the outer skins of onions all went into a jar that at the end of the month made soup. Worn shirts, t-towels, dresses too small and now not able to be worn to church again were made into pieces and sewn into quilts. I don't know what she did with leftover tears. Maybe put them in a Fabric which would later be a poem to embrace a lonely granddaughter. That's what Lucinda's grandmother did. And now we have Fabric to embrace our laughter and tears. To carry us forward.

To help us sing a song of yesterday for tomorrow. -Nikki Giovanni In Lucinda Roy's fine new collection, Fabric, she bravely invokes a variety of horrors-war, slavery, rape, and racism, among other orders of violence--and responds to them in formally adept and deeply personal poems. Her meditations on the broad and disturbing frailties of our civilization are profoundly thoughtful and wonderfully fresh. She engages terrible realities with honest and unflinching humanity, as well as some sharp humor, and through the considerable grace of her aesthetic rendering, proposes to us that the power of human love may yet, if not prevail, keep the awful off balance. -Sidney Wade The tellers of what Auden called "the public lie" seem lately to have drowned out all other speech. Their language is one of xenophobia, racism, violence, and unparalleled arrogance. Lucinda Roy's quietly courageous and formally dexterous poems are meant, above all, to speak truth to the public lie. And the truths they speak are rich and various.

We are offered, among other things, studies of child soldiers in war-ravaged Africa, elegies fashioned in the terrible aftermath of the Virginia Tech slayings, ekphrastic meditations on African masks that remind us of the preciousness of myth-making, and self-portraits that strive to arrive at a hard-won, essential wisdom. As she writes in one of the book's most characteristic poems, "After so much loss I still believe-still want to believe tonight/that the Small-Life we lead can dance a cosmos." After reading this splendid collection, we want to share this belief. --David Wojahn.