The Darkened Temple

Mari L'Esperance is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where she was a New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. Her earlier poetry collection Begin Here was awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in several print and online journals and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Many Mountains Moving, Poetry Kanto, Prairie Schooner, and Salamander. L'Esperance's honors include two Pushcart Prize nominations and residency fellowships from Hedgebrook and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. She lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Acknowledgments fog : memory 1. The Bush Warbler Laments to the Woodcutter After Reading of the Expatriate Writer's Death by Shipwreck: Margaret Fuller, 1850 In the Valley of the Kings Stroke Something Coming Apart Kamakura Returning to Earth The Doll Maker Pantoum of the Blind Cambodian Women Another History Diagnosis Trio Prayer 2. The Last Time I Saw Her The Search Trying to Carry It The Shoes Caught Where the Body Might Be, the Mind Follows-- Dark House Beyond It Finding My Mother Forgetting To Her Body The Book of Ash Grief Is Deep Green For My Mother's Birthday White Hydrangeas as a Way Back to the Self 3. Begin Here What's Possible After Fire Two Maples This Hour Passing To My Father, Living for a Long Time in Another Country The Choices Not Made Last Hour With His Dead Wife Longing Map of the World Happiness and Happenstance Share the Same Root Epistle The Night Garden How It Happens Nocturne As Told by Three Rivers Notes

"Mari L'Esperance accepts all of the responsibilities inherent in the use of language by a serious poet: these poems are faithful to history, to memory, and to conscience, acknowledging the pain implicit in any thoughtful life, even as they celebrate its joys and sensual beauties." Edward Smallfield, poet and co-editor of Apogee Press "In The Darkened Temple, Mari L'Esperance enacts the process of defining a self out of fragments of cultural and personal history, the traumatic disintegration of that self, and its subsequent painful rebuilding: by turns narrative, chantlike, fractured, and lyric, these tender, terrifying, and frank poems fight their way into song." Jane Mead, author of The Usable Field "These stunning lyrics shine light on suffering. Across generations and across cultures, we follow intricate rituals of desire, of myth-making, of mourning. Via corrosive wondering about a disappeared mother, we arrive 'alone / at the gate of the unbearable.' And yet these poems, vibrant and necessary, return us to 'retrievable life,' to essential human mysteries." Peggy Shumaker, author of Just Breathe Normally "I'm deeply moved by these wrenching, exquisite poems. Like a relentless camera moving ever closer, The Darkened Temple surveys the speaker's 'crossing over / from innocence to knowing'--the disappearance of her mother and its consequences for her as she tries to continue. She endures through love, music, and dreams reuniting her with her mother. Their lasting confluence comes in these restorative poems." Carole Simmons Oles, author of Waking Stone: Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer