in the broth are bubbling./I hear spiders in the cupboards/and the angels shaking tambourines." In "Staying Home from Work" she says "Milosz was right./Even unremembered, the essential if attended to,/will surely stun, surely last" (passim).
Melanie Shumway's imagination comes to breakfast too: in a startling juxtaposition in "Over Coffee, 600 B.C." a contemporaneous citizen of Jerusalem narrates the slaying of Laban and poses a moral question plaguing believers to this day:

A friend of mine told me
so I know it's true
she saw someone in the road
behind her house
last night. . . .
. . . this morning
when she looked around
she found the man
lying in the alley
without his head. . . .
Then she noticed he'd been robbed.
His sword
and breastplategone.
But I told her
what my mother always says,
two wrongs don't make a right,
and sheagreed.
but now the problem is
a madman roams the streets.
There's no way to know
what he'll do next.
I hope he's caught and put to death
before he kills again and disturbs
us decent people of Jerusalem. (181-82)

Once again the Book of Mormon, ur - source of Mormonism's created past, has fertilized contemporary imagination. Clearly, the best of our poets are giving us what Marianne Moore said poetry should: "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" (1296).

Fiction, poetry, and the personal essay8 dominate contemporary Mormon letters. The dramatists are few, the productions infrequent. Happily, Sunstone's symposia have lately included several readings on their programs. I must confess my own ignorance. I have heard Wanda Clayton Thomas read her delightful dialect play Celestial Bliss, or Heavenly Marriage and been moved by Carol Lynn Pearson's