The Inviolable Hours by Amber Rose Crowtree

“Our bruises are never sweet,” Amber Rose Crowtree writes in one poem and they heal, but only to be replaced by newer versions. That is the work of poetry: to deal with the bruises, and this book does so with the deft touch of the accomplished poet she is. A few ages after those lines, describing early experiences with her father at a swimming hole quarry, she writes: “I’ve learned that I am my life-preserver; / I can float after all.” Reaching back into the past to find ways to “float” in the present, the book moves deftly to its resolution where, at one in an almost pastoral setting, she is like the milk snake for “she had to learn patience while skinning-herself-alive, / to abandon her aged casing—renew her tender tattoos. / Perhaps it’s not a word, but her metaphor I was looking for.” And as this terrific book tells us, she has found it, and shows us the way.

–Richard Jackson, Author of Broken Horizons, Where the Wind Comes From, Take Five, etc.

In Amber Rose Crowtree’s new book, we find a girl trapped and desiring escape—“I dared prove myself to me, to splinter out.” A girl asking what it means to be inviolable. In brave and vivid poems that document a childhood in rural Maine, Crowtree challenges us to rethink the relationship of body and landscape, the connections between danger and safety, and the role that religion plays in our lives.  As Muriel Rukeyser said, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” This is the project of The Inviolable Hours.

–Nicole Cooley