Poetry. "Out here, a shutter tries its luck on the wind. The sun's / bleached linen, dilute liquor, dry sourdough, color of / nothing. When the wheat fails the houses / come undone." Sure-footed, lyrical, and unsentimental, the poems of Melissa Mylchreest's collection WAKING THE BONES are informed by her work in Montana as a freelance journalist and her background in environmental science. Yet, despite the heartbreak and failures that have haunted this part of the west since the arrival of the "nih'óó3oo," an Arapaho word meaning both "spider" and "white man," the poet is acutely attentive to the great beauty amid whose wild contours she lives: "Yesterday, the cranes gathered / the evening beneath their wings / and rode over the valley, / the string of them like the body / of a snake, their going an old / and holy thing."
