REVIEWS

“Waring's poems forcibly avoid the workshop warp. From the opening, her language lashes. . . . Anyone would be convinced of both her originality and her toughness. . . . Waring uses tactics that women singers have known about for a long time: the balm of the work song and the empowering sounds a brassy belter makes as she sings of a tough life that earns her a living.”
--Voice Literary Supplement

“While many poets are putting retreads on worn rhetoric, Belle Waring, like some scat-singing postmodern jazz canary, is shaping a music equal to our national imagination. Refuge is by turns insouciant and despairing as it portrays the givers and seekers of sanctuary. . . .Belle Warning is charming without being slight, unsentimental without being cold.”
--Alice Fulton

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

I

Reprieve on the Stoop

Baby Random

Breeze in Translation

I Dream I Am Back in Paris

To Come Back

When a Beautiful Woman Gets on the Jutiapa Bus

Gringos

What Hurts

Children Must Have Manners

Lolly and the Pit Bull

Morley Asks, What Are You Thinking?

Innocence

Tibetan Tea

Blackout

Cut Off

An Earnest Prayer to Saint Anthony

Isabel's Mask

What Dostoevsky Said

Aftertaste

Back to Catfish

Letter to Morley, Never Mailed

II

Nothing Happened

Saudade

Breeze Weeps

Alto

Gas

Between Rounds

Storm Crossing Key Bridge

The Tip

Casualties. War Crimes

Refuge at the One Step Down

Water Flowers

Our Lady of the Laundromat

Daddy Spit Daddy Coo

Michael Simply Makes His Bed

Breeze Bottoms Out

Roman du Poisson

Christmas Eve at Port Authority

Pesto on the Porch with Cousin Kays

You're Welcome

Mares' Tails

What Makes a Queen Out of a Slave

Craps

Breeze Decides to Forgive Herself

Vallejo Takes the Metro

Karmic Oats

Marie-Geneviève Takes Tea with Her Daughter

Country Life

Lucky

Notes

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