In the Truth Room

Winner of the Morse Poetry Prize (2008)“In the Truth Room suggests the shape and necessity of a life, at once dramatically compelling and immediately believable, one in which children are eating smores while watching a Fawlty Towers video, and Volvos are skidding on ice, and people are going to 12-step meetings, museums are being visited, and jobs and essential human relationships hang in the balance. … On the face of it, the story at the center of the book seems archetypal: a daughter in midlife making sense of ongoing experience in the wake of her mother’s death while dealing with substantial crises and, eventually, undertaking what amounts to a pilgrimage. The overarching theme is individual, feminist, contemporary: how does a woman know herself apart from convention and duty? Certainly the intense poems about the mother are key to this theme. But In the Truth Room is less about one life than a fabric of interwoven lives: four generations of family, friends, dear ones, present and departed—I would be hard-pressed to name a poetry book that develops and displays affection for more characters, or, for that matter, one that contains more life.”—from the introduction by Rodney Jones