“Zeena / Zenobia Speaks engages in the essential lyric task of giving voice to the voiceless. In these poems, the taciturn meets the turn of well-wrought lines that wring meaning from the quiet sufferings of Wharton’s iconic character. Wharton’s Zeena emerges in complexity and depth, her suppressed cry released and shaped in poems of potent imagery and clipped syntax that ‘can manage the weight of snow’ and the ‘threat of fire.’”
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