The Bride Aflame

Jaclyn Dwyer

Jaclyn Dwyer’s The Bride Aflame explores—with imagination, earned wisdom, and searing wit—what it means to be a woman: to be a girl in her inescapable body; to be a lover and a wife; to be a daughter and then to raise them. These poems confront the worst horrors of womanhood—domestic violence, rape, the loss of a child—but they also revel in its possibilities. As Dwyer writes, “I make and I am.” This is a mantra for mother and poet alike.

—Maggie Smith