Sandra Becker"s IMPERFECT MATTER suggests that nothing in this world, not even yearning, is perfect, yet reaches always toward that sublimity. "In a poem in her new book, Sandra Becker confesses, "I once thought/the way to help myself/ was renunciation,/ but I need the ground." The poems in IMPERFECT MATTER are grounded in the body, in the world we inhabit, its imperfect matter, but this is also a book of the spirit. I know of no poet who more lovingly makes us aware of the fragility of both body and spirit and who more bravely engages us in the tension between the two. In another poem, "Night Travels of a Somnanbulist," she writes, "I sought to break the tethers/ to the world I knew/ that disappears as quickly as it forms." Sandra Becker knows what Emily Dickinson did: the evanescence of this world, its tug of our allegiances. This is poetry that asks of its readers a new kind of courage and that gently but boldly takes us into territory whose ground is often shaky: "This time I...