In Double Somersaults, Marlene Cookshaw writes with an unflinching openness that makes song of vulnerability and of the late twentieth century’s collecting sorrows: “All we can hope for is everything, I say/ All we are given’s an old pair of shoes.” These poems are rich with change, with aging parents and lost childhoods, torn relationships and gathering discontent. But Cookshaw’s larger concern is possibility: how we live in and with the world, how we live with ourselves.

“Marlene Cookshaw, most excellent of editors, in Double Somersaults, gives us her version. A book full of ‘logic and possibility’” — P. K. Page