In Advance of All Parting

“Baird’s remarkable first collection is besieged by angels, messengers bearing often bitter, sometimes comic, always complicated home (and broken-home) truths. Hers is a well-stocked world inflected by elegiac understanding and a brisk, unflinching willingness to encounter the hard facts of a life marked by sadness, loss and disappointment.”

—Eamon Grennan

“A tough, unsentimental examination of marital grief. Musically elegant and inventive, understated and passionate, Baird has created a richly drawn world in which this elemental drama plays out, and the result is vivid, startling poems in which pain has left its indelible tracks.”

—Chase Twichell