A couple weeks ago, I ordered and received this beauty of a poetry collection by Anna Evans, a local poet who is originally from England, which is one of the things that makes hearing her read such a pleasure. But I digress, as I've not yet heard heard Anna read from this collection. It's a collection of 39 sonnets, each one a first-person tale from a different woman. It is sometimes said that women are either saints or whores, and those are the women who make up this collection.

Here's what I said about her book over at the Online Vendor Who Must Not Be Named:

A fabulous (in both meanings of the word) imagination of the lives of varied women, using the sonnet form in creative ways to convey the boxed-in lives of so many of the "speakers" in the book throughout history, from Vestal Virgin to the woman who drew water for Jesus at the well to Joan of Arc's maidservant to Canadian dominatrix. Each poem is a first-person account sharing the thoughts of the speaker on their particular situation in life, and occasionally on how they wish them different. The collection of 39 poems is thought-provoking and interesting and extremely fun to dip into, and the cover is to die for.

Here is one of the more saintly ones, though truly, the commonalities among women within the book are greater in some ways than their differences:

My Life as a Polish Nun During World War II
by Anna M. Evans

We ran an orphanage in old Gdansk,
which overflowed in nineteen thirty-nine.
Daily, the Germans rolled by in their tanks.
We kept our heads well down and toed the line.
But any child that came here in the night,
no questions asked, was never turned away--
starving, beaten, sick, half-dead with fright,
Christian or Jew--with orphans, who can say?

We had to teach the Jewish ones the creed,
so the Gestapo wouldn't know our game.
The irony of sowing that small seed,
it wasn't lost on me, though not our aim.
Children are dear to God, gentile or Jew.
We wanted to save them all; we saved a few.

If you are interested in ordering a copy of this marvelous collection for yourself, you can do so at Anna's website.

You can find the rest of today's Poetry Friday posts by clicking on the Poetry Friday box below: