Labyrinth, by Jennifer Newhouse

To paraphrase Walt Whitman, whoever touches the poems in Jennifer Newhouse’s Labyrinth touches a woman–a young woman “blue with life,” “ample and strong,” as much a Mary as a Martha, fluent in both “the celebration and the clean-up.” And while these poems converse with a wide range of literary traditions–romanticism, the pastoral–they never once use their “poetic” awareness against the reader, but rather acknowledge, as in “After Abandoned Wasp Nests,” that we are all–in our desires, our homing instinct, our need for freedom’s flight, “more alike than not./ That life means life means life:/ bumblebee, raccoon, human, wasp–.” -Lisa Russ Spaar