Restoration: Poems (Triquarterly) - Tapa dura

"[A]n elegant, intimate, and melodious 'journey in a circle'... It combines a confessional poet's personality with a language poet's anxiety about the written word, a romantic's insistence on self with a postmodernist's sense of fracture, and an imagist's attention to detail with the metaphorist's imaginative freedom. In this way, Pugh addresses the aesthetic the concerns of her day while also surpassing them."--Jennifer Banks

Complex and focused, this collection of poems moves along the line between waking and sleeping to reveal a narrator who is contemplating her origins as well as her future. Pugh frequently turns in her work to the image of a bed - as a source of comfort, an erotic landing, and a place for dreaming. For Pugh, dreams both obscure and reveal, their language a code to be analyzed, as in her longer meditation inspired by Freud's case history 'Dora'. After dipping dangerously far into dreams, Pugh's poems return to a world of activity, full of physicality before becoming calm. At the end of the book, the self is restored and can see the world through a newly formed lens taken from its dreams.