Dusting the Glass

In Dusting the Glass, Nancy Kaye Dobson trains a compassionate gaze upon often unglamorous protagonists or uncomfortable subjects. Precise language and startling imagery evoke the subtle significances of everyday existence—of youth and aging, regrets and revelations, dreams and disillusionment—while the spaces between images allow us to personalize them with our own recall. Thus, we are simultaneously drawn into both the poems themselves and our own memories, and we then must, as the author has done, confront them and wrest meaning from them. In any case, to read these poems, we must be undaunted by what we might find, as Dobson must have been when she stared these always human and often haunting images directly in the face.