Wise blood throbs in the veins of these poems, and wild song lilts through each line. From Carolina woods to Texas canyons, from motherhood to slaughter, Noel Crook’s Salt Moon startles with its reach and gratifies with its depth. Don’t miss this exquisite book.”Barbara Ras, author of The Last Skin
“I feel carried away by these rapturously perfect poems. Hold any line or stanza in your mindit bears the exact weight, energy, and detail needed to create the scenes and worlds inhabiting this most potent, tender collection.”Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Transfer
“Morally complex, syntactically dexterous, these brave poems simultaneously consider the past and the future in images that both lacerate and reconcile. Crook merges worldswhite sun, white moonin poems whose yearning leads us back and forth from stars to nearer fires.”Dorianne Laux, author of Facts about the Moon
“Crook gives us close-ups of overwhelming desire, deepest tenderness, terror, and stunned love. Salt Moon ranges wide, taking us through contradictory landscapes into instantly recognizable human frailty and bravery. And all of it is singing.”Betty Adcock, author of Intervale: New and Selected Poems
“The voice in these poems is authentic . . . a wise observer earning the reader’s trust from the outsetsly, dark, and lovely in its speech. I always knew her first book would be a stunner.”John Balaban, author of Locusts at the Edge of Summer
“Crook’s concerns are dark and weighty. But hers is a fiercely resilient voice, aware of its own ‘black capacities’ for survivaland equally unmistakable, the beauty she finds for us in the ‘butcher knife that fits the palm like an answer.’ Salt Moon is an important debut, a finely made, courageous book.”Claudia Emerson, author of Late Wife