Still Life with Dirty Dishes: Poems

Like its title poem, this collection insists on art's daily necessity. McCallum chronicles the rhythms of family life, and in the domestic pause between chore and love, in the hushed wake of cleaving or grieving, she catches a visceral sense of life's intensity. In a parent's gaze, a child's "becoming/individual" transfixes attention on the momentousness of any given moment, and it's this same gaze the poet lifts to consider how Being shapes itself into the patterns we'll look back on to recognize as our lives. Fluid, confident, and honest, these poems celebrate creativity and find it both rare and everywhere. --Elizabeth Dodd