“The Deepest Part of Dark, the unlit segments of the human world are ever-shifting, ever-present, never knowable in the fullest sense, and constantly sharing something personal. The sense of the “dark” in this collection is psychological, emotional, and physical in the sense that some poems take us to grave sites and elegize a familial Russian past as well as the American passing of more recent family members. There is a spiritual sense of darkness in these poems is still one other way: Pluto’s sensibility inherits, even if she does not necessarily embrace, the fragments of western religious thought and tradition that swirl everywhere around her. The language in these poems gives itself to a multiplicity of meaning rather than to certain meaning: “Hallowed out of the father/are the dead/and on my knees/with shimmering eyes/to catch/the light.” As they range from grief to love, from lamentation to a beauty that speaks from the silence of dark places, these poems reflect the mature vision of a woman in the fullness of life.

 -Steven Haven, author of The Last Sacred Place in North America (poetry).”