Daughter Of
Cedar Hill Books 2005

Praise for Daughter Of

Daughter Of is a rich and compelling book by a poet at the height of her powers. Kathleen Aguero doesn’t waste words, writes with feeling, and knows how to deliver a kick-in-the-teeth surprise. Her gift for seeing sharp, unexpected resemblances kept me saying Yes—that’s exactly right. Her account of the bitter post-Tempest married life of Shakespeare’s Miranda is alone worth the price of admission; but the book abounds in other accomplished poems, evidently drawn from myth, dream, longing, family lore and memorable experience.

— X.J. Kennedy

In Daughter Of, Kathleen Aguero documents, with devastating precision, the private and public lives of girls and women. Inflected by feminism and post modernism, these poems—couplets, free verse, litany, prose poem, rhymed quatrains, crowns of sonnets, villanelle—deliver many sonic pleasures as they detonate pieties. The poet deploys figures from religion and mythology to illuminate, with canny intelligence, western constructions of body, gender, relationship: in a dramatic monologue, a contemporary Persephone admits I mistook/his appraisal for praise. There’s no mistaking Aguero’s linguistic nimbleness or her searing insights in this heartbreaking and tough-minded collection.

— Robin Becker, author of The Horse Fair

The Miranda of the brilliant opening sequence in Kathleen Aguero’s new collection, Daughter Of embodies Deleuze and Guattari’s radical insight, from Anti-Oedipus, that “the unconscious is an orphan and creates itself out of nature and man.” Forged of equal parts will and insight, the Miranda who abandons her fate for the dark lore of her mother and brother is the mind and heart that course through all the poems of this collection. Wide-ranging and masterful in form, they wed sheer lyric gorgeousness with discursive gravity. The woman’s voice in American poetry that was only dreamed of thirty years ago has been realized in this collection that excavates and polishes finds from the landscape of female life in myth, literature, religion and integrates them seamlessly and inevitably with the pantheon of a lived contemporary and domestic life.
— Linda McCarriston