-is a cabinet of crystals each one with a cutting edge. It's a wonder.
Beloit Poetry Journal
 

-She knows we are rooted to the earth but long for stars...And she's wise enough to know that love searches us out. Dazzling.
Charlotte (N.C.) Observer
 

-She takes risks and the risks pay off. This is an altogether satisfying book.
Northwest Arkansas Times
 

-(the poems) richly present the experience of women, as the complexity of their material, emotional, and imaginative lives presses against the constraints of their assigned roles... wonderfully evocative.
Hudson Review
 

-..convincing and exquisitely visual. It plays off a painterly use of visualization and technique even as it enacts the limits of such artistry in the face of real feeling...It is the clarity of Haskins poems (and her speakers') observations combined with the sometimes elegant, sometimes searing restraint with which the observations are made, that gives these poems their impact.
Colorado Review
 

-The poems, if they are feminist, are so in the best sense of that term, because they do more than prescribe political territory. They engage in real exploration. (These poems) have depth of feeling as well as historical insight..true radiance.
Southern Humanities Review
 
 

The hunger in the title is the hunger we can not live without. The book approaches its subject from directions as diverse as a turn-of-the-century women's encyclopedia, a self guided tour through an art gallery, and two monologues set in 17th and 18th century England. Modern voices add their harmonies to the chorale. Hunger won the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1992, and has been re-issued by Story Line Press.
 
 

The rules by which we interact with each other tell us a good deal about who we are:

The First Dinner Party- The Puzzles of the Meal

Among the forest of forks and spoons
the young girl need not fear
who remembers that, as with life,
the proper meal progresses from outer,
to inner, settings. In conversation
with a partner, etiquette demands she not
assault his ear with girlish questions:
Don't you just adore Wagner? What are your
favorite plays? until the gentleman
has satisfied his appetite, and then
she must speak only softly, and seldom,
on topics proper to her femininity.
When the fingerbowl arrives, she must not
wash her grapes. If doubtful of the ways
of oranges, she must choose bananas.
When standing to leave the table, a lady
does not fold her napkin at her plate
but lets it fall, as too careful placement
implies an unseemly intention to return.

Oh Myrtle, do you think such rules
can truly bind the darker dinners of the heart?
As Charles is your brother, do you believe
I can win his favor laughing only gently,
speaking seldom, or might I, reaching across
the table, all the servants sent upstairs,
tell him quickly how I yearn? Might I wash
his grapes and hand them to him one by one?
If I, saying nothing, leave my napkin
folded by his plate, will he understand?
 
 

Dotted around the countryside where I live are small, falling-down shacks with porch rails. On the porch rails, there are often plants. The plants are often geraniums. Farm wife is about romance in the life of the woman who lives in one of these shacks:

Farm Wife

She tends the red geraniums.
When their clustered eyes go dark,
she cuts them from their stems.
With her thumb she strokes the
furry leaves, not like common cloth
but the nap and shift of velvet
falling heavy over her hips,
the long slow dance
of Paris, in France.
The swoony glide of his knife
spreading butter.
Not the bread it takes her
all day to bake,
the coarse knead and punch,
but the rise,
the pale cheek of flour,
the dip and shimmer of the heat,
the arched backs of the hills
in their arms of sky.