The Land of Milk and Honey

"Sarah Getty tells us in vivid sensuous detail how it was in the Illinois of her childhood, where corn fields were 'our forest, our ocean.' Her sense of family history illuminates the title poem and makes radiant the role of women over more than a century of physical and metaphysical voyaging. Here, poignantly, are 'mortals telling their stories."—Maxine Kumin

"Sarah Getty treats well subjects many of her contemporaries treat clumsily: the uncanny love between mothers and daughters; the complexities of feminine comradeship; the fierce beauty women find in nature, the body, and sex. A poet capable of disabused affirmation, Getty writes: 'We've come, I believe, into that land of milk and honey that pilgrims are vouchsafed in the wilderness.' Readers are likely to experience a similar sense of arrival, coming to the fertile landscape of this book, informed by myths of various degree and fully infected by the love of language."—George Bradley

"It's extraordinary in The Land of Milk and Honey how fully Sarah Getty re-imagines a prairie girlhood we thought we understood, an American landscape we thought we recognized, the ineffable tangles between female generations. With a sure hand, she builds a poetry which, quite unexpectedly, breaks from plain imagery and speech into narrative music of transfiguring, almost visionary, beauty. This is a wonderful collection."—Honor Moore

2002 Cambridge Poetry Award in the Publication Category