Death Benefits

Robin Morgan’s lyrical gifts are again on display in this limited edition of four of her most celebrated poems

Prostituted women, pimps, Alice B. Toklas, and Bertha Mason—Edward Rochester’s mad first wife in Jane Eyre—all make appearances in a poem titled “Battery,” a word that, in Morgan’s hands, has surprising meanings. Affirmation underscores the perfect Shakespearian sonnet, “Birthright,” as it counsels a defiant gaze at life and death. The life of a flower and the process it undergoes to blossom is the subject of “Peony,” with an utterly fresh metaphor that widens to embrace the planet. And the title poem, with its witty play on words, rips through denial in all its forms to find hard but bracing truths.