Goodbye, Silver Sister, Jeanne Foster’s second collection of po­ems, opens with a series of poems about a girl coming of age in pre-Katrina New Orleans, informed and haunted by the magic of the city. The powerful Pearl River forms the dividing line be­tween adulthood and other worlds, both geographic and existen­tial: “death, divorce, and the thousand other ways I would lose faith in the breastplate of love.”

The collection is also an elegy for and tribute to the poet’s par­ents, who met in the WPA Artists’ Project. Through her poems she keeps them alive and is also able to say good-bye. Like the work of her mentor, James Wright, these poems reach far beyond the personal in their willingness to look at the un­seemly sides of being human within the context of a profound spiritual search.

JEANNE FOSTER was raised in New Orleans, and now divides her time be­tween Berkeley, California, where she is a professor of English and creative writing at Saint Mary’s College, and Tuscany. She is a coeditor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor, an anthology of poems by women, and the author of a critical work, A Music of Grace: The Sacred in Contemporary American Poetry. Her previous poetry collection, A Blessing of Safe Travel, won the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, and Plough­shares, among other publications.