Dream Straw wrestles with hard questions of family, death and identity, and asks how much can love save us from ourselves or others, and how much grief is enough to bear? One of the most vivid poems is set in the pastoral landscape of the poet’s childhood in the hills of Southwest Virginia. The speaker, wearing her father’s coat into a field, is consequently trapped in a tree by hungry cows. These poems, in which no word is misplaced, carry mythic and fairytale-like resonance, presenting ruptures into the depths of feminine psyche.Cathryn Hankla, author of Lost Places, Galaxies, and Great BearEarly on in this haunted and haunting collection, the poet asks (in a poem of skillful and somber rhetoric directed toward—putting its finger on—an urgent existential question): “What good is this?/ Of what use, this gift?” The answer is here in these poems dense with the texture of relations (of family and friends, living and dead). Again and again, these poems of expressive anguish show us, as poems must, how to live deeply, and why.Gregory OrrDeath is both accomplice and adversary in Mariflo Stephens’s brilliantly succinct Dream Straw. The grim wit of its poems comforts us even as it generates a lasting disturbance. This little book makes us stronger.David Huddle, author of Blacksnake at the Family Reunion and Dream Sender