From timber to beam, Rachel Rhinehart’s The Church in the Plains is built of beautifully hewn poems. A congregation of rural, midwestern voices inhabits these pages and offers testimony of the sublime-spirited and broken-bodied. Rinehart’s poetry reminds us that “for every dog dead on the road,/another limps home, and the cock escapes/ the fox’s jaws to crow a third time.”.  This is a soul-searing and brilliant debut collection.

  Amy Fleury Sympathetic Magic