Catriona Strang expertly “fabricates her own reality” in poems that explore the female condition and respond to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. In a powerful and rare display of poetic ingenuity, Strang situates classical themes of existentialism, memory, time, and the role of women in two clarifying contexts: the metaphorical mailbox of Proust and the speaker’s own body, as understood in geographical and geological terms.

we need
not gulf
doubt

nor gist-pierce
our place

whatever grip
or drib
we might
or mean

Dear Proust, / You’ve been dawning on me. Gradually, by the charm of all your explanations, our lives have come to be ­constituted through art. We have made several realities, far beyond the reach of terrible conservative eyes, which grow greater, or are illuminated. Consequence really lives thus, I mean all the time.