"Throughout "Dear Vulcan," Laura Davenport confronts the vexing possibilities of human intimacy, as she asks, "Isn't the question what keeps me coming back?" In carefully crafted verse, she reflects on how unspoken expectations shape our identities and relationships with ourselves and others. Located in evocative settings from the South and the imagined landscape of a "City without Women," the poems in this incandescent collection measure again and again the distance between men and women, questioning the nature of solitude and the need for human connection. With an intimate voice, often beginning mid-conversation, Davenport's poems draw in the reader with precise details as they question assumptions about identity and intimacy, memory and reality"--
