In just five lines, Jo McDougall can make you shudder. Her poems are often as stark and open as their settings—the Kansas plains and Southern bottomlands. But in these wide fields and hot kitchens, on these front porches where ordinary people tell their stories, the everyday becomes fabled, truth becomes hallowed. To C. D. Wright, McDougall writes “a lean, stoic line; each poem makes its mark, like spit.” In those lines, McDougall brings to life farmers, dressmakers, widows, and waitresses with such precise clarity that we take part in the strange delights, the struggles, the tangled mysteries of their faltering lives.