With lush, inventive metaphors, Peggy Hammond’s poems in The Fifth House Tilts tell a story of marital betrayal and healing mapped to the actual, phenomenal earth in all its forms: the speaker’s garden, the turning seasons, the roots and branches of trees, cities from Paris to Bruges, the graveside of an unknown person where the speaker imagines herself the honored widow, embraced by others. She flows as though water to the dawning reality that she is alone—Of being beloved,/I must not be covetous—and that she will survive. Through tightly woven images and persistent truth-telling, the speaker arrives back at herself: I have ceased suffering/the singe of your desires./I am granite./I will not crumble. This is a book not only of survival, but of the very mechanics of hope and despair and perseverance, and one to which I will come back again.
–Erica Bodwell
author of Crown of Wild
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