Margaret Benbow
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 108
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1997 Winner Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry"A quest, not for fickle happiness, whose pursuit is unworthy, but joy, more durable and much harder won."--Robert A. Fink"A wild, wild ride. Fierce and chancy, passionate and bawdy, Margaret Benbow's exuberant first book is nothing short of rapturous, enrapturing. . . . She's drawn to the hot, the dangerous, the lush, the profuse. Given the choice of angel or bogeyman, she'll take the bogeyman every time."--Ronald Wallace How to Tell a Bird of PreyGirls weighing less than a hundred pounds, girls who look as though they were raised onmilk veal and summer wine, can chew down through the roofand devour whole families. This one wantsthe man: rank and sexy as an old bobcat.She likes his face, that mess of big prize vegetableswith rooty beard and spud chin, red onion cheeksand hot toad tongue: Wonderful things might happen, she reflects, if I kiss a toad.She doesn't see his nose, that crackbrain crackheart beak.She doesn't mark his gaze, beautiful blood in the raptor's eye.