Day of Our Lives is equal parts social history and memoir documenting the unraveling of a marriage against the backdrop of the shifting social mores of 1960s and ’70s America. Joan Aleshire’s speaker, a young wife, enters marriage gratefully, even eagerly, believing it to be “a long table / with friends crowding in, red wine / in tumblers.” Motherhood follows, but so do infidelities and reconciliation and ultimately divorce. With each hard knock, the speaker sheds a little more of her innocence as she gains awareness of her power as both a woman and a writer: “Coming home / late from a festival for women / where I’d said all the things / the audience liked, I slipped / into bed so flush with triumph / my husband recoiled from the heat.”

Joan Aleshire was a member of the Warren Wilson MFA poetry faculty from 1983 through 2013. Days of Our Lives is her sixth book of poetry; she has also published essays and translations. She lives in Vermont, where she is a library trustee and the founder of SAGE, an organization that supports sustainable agricultural education and the arts. She is at work on a novel.

— Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books