In House of Poured-Out Waters, Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency.
    
More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future--but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her.  Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.