Dark Beds: Ebook

“Dark Beds is a lush book—of the body and the world—that boldly reckons with the ways we’re inextricably tethered to nature and to each other.” —Erika Meitner

“From the sexual urgency of spring and the critical overthinking of winter, Whitney’s stunning, beautiful, feminist poems lead us into the magical and sometimes dark natural world, where we find a mirror and metaphor for our wildest, deepest selves.” —Elizabeth Powell

“Dark Beds is a clear-eyed account of the push-and-pull at work on the speaker in these poems: young children, aging parents, the ebb and flow of marital love, and a longing for a life more expansive than the nuclear family. It is also a master class on the uses of rhyme and music; the reader feels these poems singing in her bones.” —Literary Mama

“Whitney’s rich, sensual, formally deft and often erotic poems of transgression and fidelity in realms domestic and beyond remind us that there is always a place in the Zeitgeist for the lyric poem of interiority and beauty. Whether delivering snacks to hungry first-graders and then rushing home to vacuum glow-in-the dark stars from the Berber carpet or swooning over ‘rapture without consequence,’ this is a speaker who turns again and again to the natural world for its lessons of indifference and transformation.” —Final judge Lisa Russ Spaar, PSV North American Poetry Book Award