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"Gloryland" re-examines motherhood, death, birth, and rebirth, drawing on religious and secular creation myths to enact a feminist religion. Bold, rich lyrics reveal the grand in the domestic, claiming the physical as an essential part of the -female experience, declaring that to "live fully in the body "is the truest, bravest, and most glorious form of worship.

"Book One"

"Light was being, held by her own hands or
touched like water burning bare skin.
In the beginning meant learning to see: a thousand
kinds of green, the vine-crawl along rocks,
the groping mouths of flowers. In the beginning
all they knew was yes, so when the first no
settled quietly around the tree
they thought it birdsong, it took days or weeks
for them to even notice its echo
in the leaves, an absence really, the start of loss.
Later, when the suffering began, who could
she turn to and say: I didn't ask to be born,
squatting, the light separate and cold, distant
as God, and she, already, refusing to kneel."

Anne Marie Macari's first book, "Ivory Cradle," won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2000. Her poems have beenpublished in many magazines, such as "TriQuarterly," "The American Poetry Review," "Five Points," and "The Iowa Review," Macari is on the core faculty of the New England College low residency MFA program.