Rita Dove is one of our finest poets. She has been named Poet Laureate twice; once in 1993, and then again in 1999. Her Pulitzer-winning collection Thomas and Beulah is a collection of poems that create a chronological narrative. It serves as a biography of Dove's maternal grandparents, who would have had no voice without her.
Many of her poems not in that collection are equally compelling. "Reading Mickey In the Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed" captures the moment where her daughter, at a very young age, learns the difference between girls and boys, using Maurice Sendak's book as a starting off point. Mickey In the Night Kitchen has often been banned because Mickey is drawn in the nude, but Dove shows how this can be a positive moment between mother and child in her beautiful poem.
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