In Clutch & Brood, Christina Veladota mesmerizes us with her juxtaposition of image and syntax. Her poems are a series of nests through which we reinvent our sense of home. "We are there before we know it's there," she says, and she could be speaking of the secret arrival of her own poems, of the lantern effect they have on our minds. These poems create and break expectation; they strike with a fatal blow. -Jennifer Militello Christina Veladota's Clutch & Brood is a wild ride through the vagaries of memory, fueled by the broken language of loss and disappearance. But in Veladota's vision, nothing is truly gone, as each disappearance has the chance of opening back as a haunting, where "each moment I forget has a pale & difficult daughter." I love the awareness of this collection, the scope of its inclusion, as it travels from the fugitive into prayers and rememberings, calling the ghosts of experience and memory back, allowing loss to continue to present itself as a true and real presence. It's a singular experience, one that complicates and yearns for the communal, coming to us with the proposal, "I'll acknowledge your ghosts, if you acknowledge mine.

" -John Gallaher.