Poetry. Winner of the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. THE CLOSE WORLD is a prayer toward co-existence between self and other, past and present, the natural and the made world. Despite painful images drawn from childhood in the segregated south of the 50's and work in Rwanda and Congo, despite burdens of body and mind--'a woman harnessed to wood' or 'the soldier who will never not have killed'--this book of quiet witness and struggle for faith also offers up the beauty in 'feathers soft as smoke' or a snake 'buried in drifting blossoms, ' and the balm of deep, intuitive connection, whether found in a mother's dented tin measuring cup or in the 'breathing' trees' 'hunger to grow.' These quiet, sure-footed poems convey the irreplaceable value of 'foraging for hope's marrow.'--Ellen Dore Watson