<DIV><p>"The poet’s journey into the past and another culture, fired by eponymous inspiration, leads to discoveries, a new appreciation of lost moments. To bridge three centuries and create a verbal portrait though a picture is lacking is quite an achievement. Naturally, this effort will be compared to John Berryman’s great poem about Anne Bradstreet, but to no harm."--David Ray</p><p>"In this fascinating sequence Penelope Scambly Schott poignantly re-imagines a devastating story in language that brings together the sensibilities of centuries distant in time but not, at their most intimate, in feeling. She invokes her namesake with urgency and tact, a remarkable combination."--Rosellen Brown</p><p>This brilliant tour-de-force narrates the life of a woman shipwrecked in the 1640s on the shores of modern-day New Jersey, axed in the belly, half-scalped and left for dead by the Lenape Indians, then nursed back to health by them and taken into the tribe. And that’s only the beginning.<BR><BR> Penelope Scambly Schott has carefully researched the facts and woven them into a poetic page-turner. She cites her sources, provides a glossary and, best of all, indicates what is fact and what is fiction. Her technique is well chosen: the interior monologues, mostly of the heroine, Penelope Kent van Princis Stout, and, in a few poems, those of her namesake, the author. A more distant Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, is also invoked.<BR><BR> The poems take us directly into the mind and heart of a strong woman, who is extraordinary partly because she thinks she is ordinary. With craftsmanship and feeling, Schott has limned unforgettable characters whose lives transcend the mostly ignoble history of settler-Native American relations.</p><p>Penelope Scambly Schott is the author of three previous collections of poems, most recently <I>The Perfect Mother</I>, which won the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded four fellowships by the New Jersey Council on the Arts.</p></div>