Angela Alaimo O"Donnell"s WAKING MY MOTHER reaches through memory to truth, enlarging family history and stories of her mother"s life into connections that twine us all: story, spirit, family. "If art is what we do to break bread with the dead (Auden), and rhyme and meter are the table manners (Heaney), then Angela Alaimo O"Donnell"s hard-won, well-wrought, acoustically sumptuous poems set forth a proper feast: haunting, abundant, free of pieties. As with any good wake, here the living and the dead behold one another. The kinship is astonishing."-Thomas Lynch