Gloryland / Anne Marie Macari.

In her sumptuously visceral second collection, Macari invites readers into a world alive with women, where every "you" and "she" is an echo of another "I." The effect is a fleet of voices insisting on the body as source of knowledge and experience--for "Who wants to be / anything but flesh"? Indeed, here flesh is freedom, made of startling doors and windows opening both outward and inward upon the "body beyond the body." As the collection builds, Mary, the quintessential virgin, makes her way to "the burned-down home of the whore," her frequent foil, seeking, it seems, a mutual exchange of secrets. In Macari's atmosphere, sense and movement are dreamlike and associative--"if I want to feel how the dead move," the speaker confides, "I should take up rowing." Indeed, while readers will be familiar with Macari's terrain--Christian myth, the revolving seasons, motherhood, death, the soup pot--her imagination creates uncanny encounters, where "clarity is the other side / of whatever I've tasted."