In Spirits of the Humid Cloud, Gillian Cummings’ cloud girls / ghost girls / doll girls / god girls sing and swing through the sky, skimming the winding syntax that ravels and unravels in her sonnet-like poems. I suggest you read this book aloud, letting it lift you in the air, rising “your sore soul, up, / into the realm of curvy bodies like cumulous / blossoms, unbuttoned blooms.” Cummings’ work is “like hope tumbling out of its soft bed,” like “the empty field of grasses: fescue, feverfew, broom sedge under blue:” it is full of the “particulars [that] make boundlessness bearable.” I cannot recommend this collection of whimsy and song, girlhood and sky, more highly.

Claudia Cortese, author of WASP QUEEN