Strange Land (University of Central Florida Contemporary Poetry) - Tapa dura

"Brilliant, darkly brilliant. These poems are deep-rooted in difficult terrain that Kraus excavates like an archaeologist and plants like a gardener."-Marie Ponsot "These are love poems, each and every one. They are fierce. Their heartening discovery is the 'syntax of repair'."-Linda Gregerson "Strange Land is as compelling a love story as Heloise and Abelard, even though it had a happy ending.... what we come away with is renewed faith in the ability of intimacy to reshape our lives."-Hal Sirowitz

Strange Land, Sharon Krau's second book of poems, chronicles the life of a woman embarking on marriage and contemplating the possibility of motherhood. The poems wrestle with the narrator's childhood, fraught with violence and ambivalence, and work to reconcile her past with the course of her future. From the Ice Child of the Andes to a pigeon lost in a New York City subway station, the imagery driving the poems is constantly surprising, and is underpinned with humor and reverence. These are rigorous poems that take nothing for granted - every emotion is interrogated, every resolution is contingent.