The Book of Common Betrayals

Book excerpt: Poetry. Lynne Knight's first book won a Quarterly Review of Literature prize in 1996. Her second full-length collection has won the Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize for 2002. In it Knight explores the idea that betrayal, whether a violation of trust or an unwitting revelation, is part of our inheritance as humans. "In poems fueled by a combination of passion and panic, Knight disarms us only to expand our vision. She turns the inner world outward and exposes what we've kept secret-sometimes even from ourselves. . . . These are driven poems uttered in the heart's vernacular"-Andrea Hollander Budy.