"Wolff keeps company with Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds, and Beth Ann Fennelly."― Publishers Weekly , starred review A bold, lyrical invention by an award-winning poet whose “gift for the gorgeous” won praise from Robert Pinsky. The King is a groundbreaking collection following a Self―a mother, lover, wife, thinker―in her fractured approach to the absolutes of pregnancy, postpartum depression, childrearing, belief, love, and epistemology. Here is a potent exploration of one woman’s coming together with the Other―her hard-won attachment to “the King.” from “Deeply Psychological” And then I surfaced a whole matrix or rubric magical thinking other kinds of thinking but in layers, you understand, with supremacy a honeycomb. Rebecca Wolff's poems about motherhood in The King are ironic and dark, slippery and exploratory, loving but not blindingly so. . . . [They] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they're unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive. " Rebecca Wolff is the editor of Fence and the author of Manderley , Figment and Continuum . She lives in Athens, New York, with her family and is a Fellow of the New York State Writers Institute.