Inspired by portraiture-a stylized art form that represents containment-OVUM renders a poetic likeness viewed through a mirror of complex inheritances: intergenerational debt, the danger and durability of a female body, and the dead.

If a book of poems is an assemblage, an egg is the origin. From New England to the American South, we travel the oval, each poem a new beginning, each poem an attempt to regain what is lost. "Horses," included in OVUM, was selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Knightville Poetry Contest and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Christine Kalafus is a previous Poet Laureate of Pomfret, Connecticut and a 2026 Best of the Net nominee.