Ultimately, Inmost follows a mother’s encounter with the violence of what she’s created, which is a mortal body. What is beautiful (infant, child) is almost most vulnerable. What is weakest and in need of protection is nearest our capacity to wound and destroy.

or:

The mother here is frame and threshold, much as each poem enacts a relentless interior we cannot look away from. The mother’s job is to teach her child how to survive in a world where mere survival is precarious. Each life begins on that, “Cliff where the cradle uncradles,” and the child emerges, exposed. (p. 23, “Pare”) As in this example, Fisher explores the way that words reflect our unreliability. She often follows a noun with a verb of the same root that shifts meaning. What is a cradle if it can uncradle? She also illustrates the paradox of likeness, as in the words, “raise” and “raze,” one meaning to build, the other to destroy (“Mortar,” p. 8).

Fisher’s first book, Frail Craft, won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Award, and Inmost marks a mature poet fully at home in her craft. For one thing, she’s a master of pacing. Fisher interweaves lyric poems with prose poems that speak more directly. In this controlled variation, the reader encounters both the pleasures of fragmented lines — often in couplet form — and the relief of sentences: “As she nurses, my nipple takes on the color of her lips” (“Want,” p. 32). Likewise, each of the book’s four sections alternate prose poems with lyric sequences, while remaining consistent in voice and tone.

Ultimately, Fisher directs and redirects our gaze toward the body, made both of flesh and language. In her last lines, Fisher reorders an unpublished Keat’s poem:

If red life is our blood, our vulnerability and means of wounding, it’s also our aliveness: the one true thing the mother gives her child as offering. “Now I need a red kiss, she says, and gives me her lips” (“Familiar,” p. 37).