Response defines poetry for me, so there is no better way to introduce Jacqueline Baldwin's book Threadbare Like Lace than to say that "Chivalry" made my eyes sting, and I laughed at the belligerent cow of "What is in This Milk?" Baldwin's voice is a mix of rustic experience informed by a retrospective feminism and the experiential wisdom of a bright child. She tells stories and she captures people in revealing detail. Her pleasures are as unreserved as a child's. Her judgement is an adult's, looking back at events that require placement in an expanded consciousness. Abusive treatment of women and children by men is an important theme in Baldwin's work. This undeniable social ill, once impossible to raise in public, is now so often acknowledged in literature as to risk a stereotypical reaction from readers: whether that is automatic, unreserved sympathy; skeptical rejection or even, regrettably, ennui. Over-exposed to anything unpleasant, it is human nature to become inured. This human failing makes it all the more important for artists to retain the power to keep truths we cannot afford to bury, fresh. Baldwin's poems of abuse succeed, for me, because no victim is faceless or interchangeable. These bad things happened to real people, who are revealed through sequences of association and narrative. Real people are not perfect. They also have lives, which no matter how grossly impacted by humiliation or terror, are larger than their abuse, and interact with other members of society, both male and female. The rape victim of "Chivalry" is pathetically but touchingly championed by an old, befuddled man intend on invoking aid for an event long past, that his failing grip on reality so very accurately recognizes as a crime with living consequences. In "Listening to Daddy", Baldwin celebrates the resilience and innate wisdom of a little girl threatened by an unspecified verbal barrage that might harm her evolving identity. Most intriguing of all is the sense of Baldwin's older self looking back on her own bad experiences with a sort of astonished perplexity that she would have cooperated even to the extent that she did in her own subjugation. Such honesty demands respect of any thinking reader, whatever his or her preconceptions. "Recycled Bleach Bottles" was, for me, the most telling poem in this category. In it, Baldwin focuses on a detail so small it should be trivial &endash; her husband's demand that she remove her name from the most homely of household items, placed there for the most noble of reasons. The fact it is not trivial, to either party, is a fierce proof of the wife's exhaustive persecution.