This year's winner of the Hayden Carruth first-book award at Copper Canyon Press is Jenny Factor's Unraveling at the Name. This one is worth not only reading but re-reading. If your tastes are anything like mine, this is a book you want to own.

The poems in Unraveling at the Name trace a woman's transition from being married to a man, through a divorce, and into single motherhood as a self-identified lesbian. Throughout, the characters of the ex-husband, the beloved small son, and the narrator's shifting selves (adolescent, adult) rise off the page.

The book's first poem, "Conciliation," is one of my favorites:

We're babies raising babies. That's a fact.
This marriage worked its best when we had time
to raise each other. Now we rock our pains
to sleep ourselves in beds on separate floors.
I dream of women, want a different life.

The dissolution of a marriage isn't an easy subject, but Factor resists the pull of predictability. Her narrator is not bitter, only sorry.

Yes, these poems are formal; they operate according to rules of rhyme, meter, and structure. But Factor's use of form pushes her forward, it doesn't hold her back. For instance, the sonnets in the sequence "Extramarital" chart the dalliance of a woman seducing a woman who is still married to a man. Poignant, painful, crisp; these poems arise from the lineage of Marilyn Hacker and Adrienne Rich. I keep returning to these lines, from "Confidential P.S.," the last poem in the sequence:

In this sonnet, as in the sequence's title, Factor defines the union by what it is not.