It's pretty rare that I read a new volume of poetry straight through, but that is how I sat with Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside last Thursday.

In this absorbing volume, Dubrow, whose husband is an officer in the navy, takes readers into the experience of military wives during wartime. Part 1 is anticipation. A deceptively delightful sonnet, "Nonessential Equipment," declares: "The dog and I are first among those things / that will not be deployed with him." "Love in the Time of Coalition" transposes lovemaking onto the register of Middle East war: "He whispers weapons of mass destruction /against the sand dune of her skin. She's toxin." Part 2 places Homer's Penelope in early 21st-century America: if "Penelope Considers a New 'Do" were the only poem in the book, it would be worth the price of admission. Part 3 lingers over some of the mundane realities of life after deployment. Our narrator finds that she and she alone now has to take out the trash, "open the stubborn jar of marinara"—and she develops tendinitis: "don't call the injury a metaphor / although it is, his absence sharp, hard /as a knob of bone, and my fingers, / clenching and unclenching what they cannot hold." And also in Part Three, the realities of life—tension, cavernous estrangement--once the deployed husband has returned: "I feel myself / withdrawing from his hand, / a touch I want / but barely understand."

It's pretty rare that I read a new volume of poetry straight through three times in one week, but that is how it's been with Jehanne Dubrow's Stateside since last Thursday.

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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