“[Beasley’s] lightness works best when it dapples her darkness—and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep.”—Abigail Deutsch, Poetry

The winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize—“These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo, prize citation

from “The Piano Speaks”

For an hour I forgot my fat self,

my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.

For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.

For an hour I was a salamander

shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,

and under his fingers the notes slid loose

from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs

that took root in the mud.