Our Lady of the Ruins

Winner of the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, Our Lady of the Ruins tracks a group of women through their pilgrimage in a mid-apocalyptic world. Exploring war, plagues, and the search for a new God in exile, these poems create a chorus of wanderers haunted by empire, God, and personal trauma.

from "Hysteria: A Requiem"

Now, in the last world, we bury nightingales

beneath the floor.

Trackers with their ears to the ground listen

for angels approaching.

Where is the saint, mortally torn and wearing a

hood of stars,

bearing her own redemption?