The Brooklyn Rail

Margo Berdeshevsky's Before the Drought

Margo Berdeshevsky’s newest book, Before the Drought, is described as a “literary inquiry” and I am inclined to agree with that definition, yet what it leaves out is the author’s wonderful passion, her daring, and in the later poems, her cleverness. So add these qualities to the mix, and what we get is brilliance, the voice dominant, the intelligence demanding, and, in this book by this writer, a whole-hearted recognition of the body, particularly the female body, in all its phases.