The Woman Who Lives Without Money [Paperback]

The poems in this first collection move through the arc of a life, with a tender focus on the landscape of childhood and the natural world. A young child’s delight in language—'derelict and delectation...onyx and obsidian'— matures to contemplate what language, myth, and art can teach us about inevitable loss: of a home the child, her mother, and sisters were forced by a troubled father to flee; of aunts, uncles, and that mother who had once seemed eternal. Woven into this narrative, the title character—a nomadic woman who lives without money—appears with her porcelain begging bowl, a figure from myth, a touchstone for what is everlasting, a moment of transcendence into a more benevolent world, the one glimpsed again and again in these poems."This collection is so sensory and so full of lively detail that it’s easy to miss how elegiac it is. There’s great loss here—of childhood innocence and security, of home and family. In the haunting sequence of prose poems that give the book its title, the homeless 'woman who lives without money' literally loses (or gives up) everything. But loss is less a subject for grief than a path toward greater understanding. In 'Indistinct,' the speaker who 'longed for perfect sight' comes at last to embrace the “soft, mysterious,/and imperfectible world.' And although loss and tragedy confront us every day, 'Testimony' concludes that 'anyone who notices the world/ must want to save it.' Throughout this collection, Rebecca Baggett saves the world over and over again." —Eric Nelson, author ofSome WonderandTerrestrials

 "In Rebecca Baggett’s latest collection, we meet not only the woman who lived without money, but a host of other strong women. From Georgia O’Keefe, whom the poet imagines 'seeing the music, elegant hands translating / it to color, swirl, line' to teachers whló