Description: "As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices", writes Hirshfield in Given Sugar, Jane Given Salt, her fifth and most expansive volume of poems to date. In poems complex in meaning yet clear in statement and depiction, Hirshfield explores questions of identity and aging, of the losses and gains of both connection and solitude, and of the increasing pressure of time in contemporary life. Whether meditating upon a button, the role of habit in our lives, or the elusive nature of our relationship to sleep, Hirshfield brings each subject into a surprising and magnified existence. In the breadth and honed beauty of her contemplations, and in the deep usefulness readers ascribe to her work in their own lives, Hirshfield has made a place of her own among American poets.

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