By turns clever, earnest, probing, and mischievous, Marissa Glover's poems take as their subjects the ever-relevant topics of sex, parenthood, loss, illness, and faith, and yet everywhere, in their tone and attitude, speak in the singular voice of a sly and vibrant woman banging up against the absurdities and disappointments of modern life.

In an alternately refined and breezy idiom, she converses with former flames and current politicians with the same ease and aplomb she does figures from biblical history or the heroes of classical Greece. Sometimes whimsical and often cheeky, her spirited poems always mean what they say and speak forcefully from hard-won experience. Above all, reading her collection, you feel you are being addressed by a weary but resilient and savvy fellow traveler who has done her bit of living and has something urgent to tell you, often tantalizingly ""slant,"" about holding on to integrity and dignity in a world that seems utterly fallen.