Rachel DeWoskin

With a singing voice that can shake an auditorium, Judy should be the star of Darcy Academy, the local performing arts high school. So why is a girl this promising hiding out in a seedy motel room on the edge of town? A scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and profound.

Samantha Baxter has a full, sane life-creative job, lovely family, and all the trappings of middle-age happiness. But when she gets a diagnosis that terrifies her, a lifetime of polite pleasing and putting others first ignites in her a surprising, pure rage. Maybe Sam will survive the surgery, and maybe not, but either way, she'll spend the next three weeks burning her life down: sleeping with a student her daughter's age, speaking every truth she's...

"In absolute animal, Rachel DeWoskin ponders the big questions: our fragile mortality, the passage of time, the mutability of memory. Conceived in the shadow of the pandemic, with death, loss, and absent family and friends surfacing throughout, the poems nonetheless cling fiercely to life, tenaciously finding a way forward, managing to exist in the details of everyday necessity. The poems "live," as it were, in an extraordinary "now," a kind of eternal...