Origami Heart

Erin George's Origami Heart: Poems by a Woman Doing Life, is intimate, courageous, and lyrical. The "woman doing life" in Erin George's stunning first collection is at once a prisoner serving a life sentence and a woman continuing to weave the complex web of severed and ongoing relations that is her life. From the opening, title poem, wrenching in its restraint, George locates the true horror of imprisonment in a mother's separation from her children. As she folds and unfolds the "origami heart" of her daughter's much-read letter, the connection between them, like the creases in the paper, is "soft, threatening severance, / but still holding." Through these poems of memory and longing, Erin George struggles to hold on.