Upstairs, Listening - Melinda LePere

Through musically muscular verse at once tender and unflinching, Melinda LePere leads us along the fault lines of a seasoned life into spare domestic spaces, rooms populated by ghosts and puppets, Sunday gravy and severed limbs. Here, the music of the riptide competes with a cathedral's pipe organ and the slap and scratch of cars with a vacuum's roar. And to all of it, a child is always upstairs, listening. These poems know their weight. And they know us, too, how we sometimes wonder if every family is "a kind of prison." Listen, "someone is rhyming a ball against the house." Here we are, skittish as horses, a "flailing animal fighting for release." Here, we are heard; here, we are seen.

• Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, author of A Wake with Nine Shades and Her Read, A Graphic Poem