Strange Land, Sharon Kraus's second book of poems, chronicles the life of a woman embarking on marriage and contemplating the possibility of motherhood. The poems wrestle with the narrator's childhood, fraught with violence and ambivalence, and work to reconcile her past with the course of her future. From the Ice Child of the Andes to a pigeon lost in a New York City subway station, the imagery driving the poems is constantly surprising, and is underpinned with humor and reverence. These are rigorous poems that take nothing for granted—every emotion is interrogated, every resolution is contingent. A National Poetry Series Finalist for the year 2000 Marie Ponsot: "Brilliant, darkly brilliant. The poems are deep-rooted in difficult terrain that Kraus excavates like an archaeologist and plants like a gardener. They reach from harm to healing and the risk of hope, full of mental action that enriches the ordinary world. I delight in their sturdy promise, their airy music." Linda Gregerson: "When the Melodians adapted the 137th Psalm to produce their immensely popular reggae ballad, 'Rivers of Babylon,' they gave new voice to the anguish of exile and the longing for home. 'How can we sing King Alfa song / In a strange land?' they sang. What they occluded for their popular audience was the exile's concomitant search for revenge: 'O daughter of Babylon,' the Psalmist continues, 'Happy shall be he, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.' Sharon Kraus, who takes the title of her book from this same Psalm, courageously remembers the two sides of suffering. The speaker of these poems has herself been the child who is dashed against stones. And yet, or rather, and therefore, these are love poems, each and every one. They are fierce. Their heartening discovery is the 'syntax of repair'." Hal Sirowitz: "Strange Land is as compelling a love story as Heloise and Abelard, even though it has a happy ending. Kraus takes us on a journey through her marriage and what we come away with is renewed faith in the ability of intimacy to reshape our lives. She overcomes her fear of abandonment without the psychological babble. We gain greater understanding of the power of marriage, which gave us this great book." The Sacrifice I think the problem is, my first crush was Mr. Spock. Specifically, I loved his torment, composed of not having feelings and having feelings: He worked so hard against emotions, and when I was nine I would sneak to the television after bedtime so that I might the labor of holding oneself in. And of course I would be the one who with great effort and attention elicited a response. It was gorgeous to imagine someone quiet. I didn't think: "like my father," or even "not like my ravishing mother," though of course it later turned out that every boyfriend was slightly Vulcan. The ears were deceptively humanoid, was all. Even now, I am drawn to the ways in which Brian is absent. He doesn't worry, for example, about whether I love him. He plays computer games, he types, he turns his back to the room: I love getting to drape myself over the turned back, getting to demand the kiss--the turn toward, the lean into. And then to get the stopping, the turn again away. The two times he's held on too hard, there has been in me a tinny blip of horror: the vanishing dot on the screen, when you shut it off, which lingers, brightly cringing. When I try to look away, it's still there, glowing. That he might want something from me. So it wasn't until we watched "The Ice Goddess" on PBS--the archaeologists in their parkas hacking at the Peruvian snow, the child they drew forth from the last millennium, huddled over his death, his forehead pressed to the drawn-up knees, the hands clutching the ankles as though he were still rocking himself, the lips drawn up in that shriek. Nearby, his gold toy llama. Apparently it was a privilege to offer one's child up--the slaughtered boy's arms still holding very tightly to empty space, and Brian not minding my weeping, he himself moaning a little at the boy's broken skull-- only then did I see how it might be, the boy wanting to be lifted up, holding his arms out. Asking. Asking again.