“I have no will,” Schiff writes, “I have a / habitat that possesses / me that I overlook.” We are of our property not only in the sense that it determines our status, but also that it guides our behavior. As Schiff is so keenly aware, looking after something (or someone) requires certain things of us, sometimes to the extent that we are owned by what we own. In many ways, the book considers what it means to be a steward or caretaker. The legal dispute in the poem is over a property line, the boundary separating her neighbor’s yard from hers, and as the collection’s title suggests, her collection is broadly concerned with property and propriety-with who possesses what, and what such possession entails. Take “A Hearing,” for example, the poem from which her bold claim comes: it begins as a campy courtroom drama, complete with testimony and objections, but quickly spirals outwards to include everything from Jaws to Jane Eyre to Chechen terrorism. Schiff is a verse hoarder, a writer of intricate kitchen-sink lyrics, whose serpentine sentences pack more personal, cultural, and historical stuff into single poems than most poets fit into whole books. “Born so late in natural / history, I look after everything,” Robyn Schiff declares in A Woman of Property, her breathtaking third collection, and as hyperbolic as that sounds, it is also, on a certain level, completely accurate. “Mud Stuck to our Shoes”: On The Insistence of Harm by Fernando Valverde On Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Tretheweyīlurring the Obvious: Bluebeard’s First Wife by Ha Seong-Nan “Story Comes From Place”: On Site Fidelity by Claire Boyles New Worlds Forever Measured by the Old: On Burning Province by Michael Prior On Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing by Julie Marie Wade The Ductility of Person and Time in Saddiq Dzukogi’s Your Crib, My Qibla Our Final Words: A Review of Eternal Sentences by Michael McGriff The World Owes You Nothing: A Review of Mine! by Michael Heller and James Salzman On Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown Reverberations and Divinations in Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra Infinite Entanglements in Allison Cobb’s Plastic: An Autobiographyįrom Apocalypse to Apocalypso: On An Ecotopian Lexicon Near But Not Touching: On The Naomi Letters by Rachel Mennies On A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill “In Front of Strangers I Sing”: The Strange Intimacy of Paul Celan Poems That Linger: Peter Campion’s One Summer Evening at the Falls The Aesthetics of Cosmic Feminism: A Review of Magda Cârneci’s FEM Unearthing Memory and Reclaiming the Feminine in Shanta Lee Gander’s GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA How History Claims Us: On Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley “Empire Gold” : A Review of Claire Meuschke’s UPEND Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement.Developmental Editing Fellowship for Emerging Writers.The Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers.