Carol Muske-Dukes is a poet, critical essayist, and fiction author. Her poetry collection, Sparrow: Poems, a haunting elegy for her late husband, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her new collection, Twin Cities (Penguin Books), is a book of poems about how things double: by reflection, by reproduction, by severance. The poems embark from the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, divided by a legendary river, and move on to the parallel histories of a life lived and a life imagined – and the random intersection of the two. Lit by loss, these moving poems navigate between the poles of love and grief, curse and blessing, and abandonment and rescue.