By searching inside words like “even” and “never” to find the name of Eve, the first poem in A Dangerous Heaven invites us to use language, the medium by which we receive sacred stories, to question and illuminate those stories. In this keenly contemplative collection, naming and other language acts, and words–mistaken or intended–become the vehicles by which Jo Angela Edwins’ vivid figures build and rebuild stories of community and history, spirit and self. What kindles and compels in these poems is their fierce, generous lyric attention–to family, to the earth, to story and words for tenderness, violence, and terrible beauty, particularly in the lives of women, contemporary and Biblical. Edwins’ meditative images consider the “wild electrical stretch” of a human body’s craving, or the mystery of the luna moth, “what it means to be born / to a form so beautiful / the symmetry leaves / no space for a mouth, / no need to cry out.” But these poems will cry out, because “sometimes we can do / no more in this dusky world than plead to air.” They listen, too, anew for the voice of God, which may sound to Moses like “the hushed singing of our mothers.” Their discoveries offer bright chances to see where beauty and grief meet, and to “declare the cotton / falling from cottonwood / a giving, not a leaving”–to re-name what needs re-naming, taking language into their own bold and wondrous hands.

Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf