Compulsions of Silkworms and Bees: Poems

Her poetry is meaningful and quite deep. I had to read for class but I truly did enjoy it.

I am a writer and reader of poetry who usually stays away from poems about poetry or the writing of it, but Julianna Baggott's new collection resonates beyond the sometimes self-involved world of poetry. It ventures into moments of human life and creates vignettes of intimacy, so much so that her vehicle of using the craft of writing as a spring board fades, and true human emotion is unearthed. Her language has a clarity and vibrancy, and it is from there that her images stay hinged in the mind: "...my mother shining with sweat, not so much/ the moth-tinging bulb above her head,/ but the poem, in the road/ hissing like a rearing hood-flared cobra, the old sibilant iron,/ its red glowing eye."