Wendy Bourgeois is a poet, a teacher, and a staff writer at Propeller, where “Reading Lines,” her popular column on poetry and life, has run for the past several years. This collection reveals that in addition to the humor, intelligence, and insight Bourgeois offers in her responses to poetry and philosophy, she also has the ability to craft, in just a few words, indelible sketches of children and parents, lovers and friends. Together the pieces acquire the character of a subtle memoir, both intimate and cultural, from a fiercely intelligent woman assessing the power and predicaments we discover not only in literature, but in life itself. “These essays are dishy, spoken in the voice of a confidant, as Bourgeois tucks each poet’s line inside a closet of her own stories, secrets, and desires. What’s astonishing is the way she can unpack an idea, a feeling, an experience, or an especially dense or opaque line of poetry so deftly and completely, as if picking apart a hopeless knot in an impossibly delicate chain. Once untangled, a truth sparkles under the beam of her bright intelligence. Though the pieces reckon with literature and theory across time, the ageless themes are housed firmly in their modern context: Power, Death, Religion, Marriage, Beauty, Femininity, Motherhood, Love, God. If poetry is a distillation, these essays offer a concentrated drop of truth reconstituted in a personal and cultural moment.” —from the foreword by Daneen Bergland