The Second Child: Poems [Paperback]

Nine years after the stunning debut of her critically acclaimed poetry collection A Working Girl Can’t Win, which chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young woman, Deborah Garrison now moves into another stage of adulthood–starting a family and saying good-bye to a more carefree self.

In The Second Child, Garrison explores every facet of motherhood–the ambivalence, the trepidation, and the joy (“Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness, / The globe already set aspin, particular / Of a whole new life”)– and comes to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in the world around her. She lays out her post-9/11 fears as she commutes daily to the city, continues to seek passion in her marriage, and wrestles with her feelings about faith and the mysterious gift of happiness.

Sometimes sensual, sometimes succinct, always candid, The Second Child is a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the everyday–nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child and knowing when to let go. With a voice sound and wise, Garrison examines a life fully lived.Deborah Garrison is the author of A Working Girl Can’t Win: and Other Poems. For fifteen years, she worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and is now the poetry editor af Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She lives with her husband and three children in Montclair, New Jersey.On New Terms

I’d like to begin again. Not touch my own face, not tremble in the dark before an intruder who never arrives. Not apologize. Not scurry, not pace. Not refuse to keep notes of what meant the most. Not skirt my father’s ghost. Not abandon piano, or a book before the end. Not count, count, count and wait, poised—the control, the lӑ