Pluto’s restless speaker catalogs the richness and depth of women’s experiences in How Many Miles to Babylon? This is poetry of witness – to chronicle the sacrificed lives of activists – the failings and sad misunderstanding in friendships – the loss of a husband – the return to a childhood home where only ghosts roam – the measure of love that death cannot erase, and the significance of books in shaping the speaker’s worldview: the knowledge that women are the ones who regroup after tragedy and remake the world.
How Many Miles to Babylon?
Praise for How Many Miles to Babylon?
“The speaker in Anne Elezabeth Pluto’s moving, grief-ridden collection, How Many Miles to Babylon?, asks how can we bear tragedy and suffering when “life goes on/and on/and on.” It is an ambitious collection that navigates the political and the personal with equal aplomb—past and present wars in her ancestral homeland, homages to her literary idols, memories of friends and teachers from childhood, and most poignantly, elegies for the speaker’s beloved partner. These finely crafted poems use assonance, consonance and rhyme to great effect. “Dog and Bed” has haunted me since I heard Pluto read it several months ago. After the tragic death of the speaker’s beloved, whom she cared for in home hospice, she and her dog listen as the nurses and funeral director coldly carry out the business of death. She listens as they deflate his mattress and after they leave, she sleeps on the couch because she had “forgotten how to use a bed.” For all its sorrow, the book is one of resilience, hope, and beauty. It answers its own question about why we endure, “women/ are the ones who weave the remains of ruin../ who decide to live to tell the story.”
-Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023)
“These clear-eyed, haunting poems map complex and intertwining responses to the question Anne Pluto’s collection poses about desire, endurance, and the search for home.”
— Mary Pinard, Author of Ghost Heart
“How Many Miles to Bablyon? is like opening a drawer and discovering a dark leather glove an ancestor left so long ago that when you open it, the smells come rushing in and you are transposed to a snowbound day or riding a painted horse on a wild Texas prairie. ”
— Gloria Monaghan, Author of Cormorant on the Strand