Chelsea Wagenaar’s poetry collection The Spinning Place is an intensely personal exploration of relationship, family, and motherhood. Her voice is that of a mystic, reporting to us the connections everywhere between the mundane and the sublime, the infinitesimal and the infinite. She fearlessly relates the sacred mysteries of life: the dreams of infants, the cold silence after an argument, the empty space where a barn once stood, and the miraculous odds of having been born at all. Wagenaar’s sparkling train of thought stitches together these otherwise disparate elements, these connections we miss in the rhythm of our daily lives. In “The Spinning Place,” the first of three poems with the same title and the poem that opens the collection, Wagenaar leads us through a graceful flow of subjects, leaping from the creative writing classroom to the delivery room to the Mars Rover, singing “Happy Birthday” to itself alone on that red, alien planet. In “Descent (Sort of an Annunciation),” at a sonogram appointment, the poet becomes a hawk watching for prey by the highway, and her prey—the hawk’s mouse in the grass—becomes the fluttering heartbeat on the screen. Wagenaar writes much about pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, and continue...