In her third volume of poetry, The Wanton Sublime, Anna Rabinowitz creates an extended meditation upon the Annunciation — the moment that starts everything in traditional Christian believing — the moment the angel Gabriel appears to a young Mary and tells her she's going to be the mother of God. As a Protestant male, I may not be best positioned to review such poetry. More so given that I belong to a denomination which is comfortable ordaining openly gay clergy. In the faith community I frequent, concerns about the Annunciation have been tossed into a dusty remainder bin, and its controversies passed long ago. Why should I care what women are saying now about the Annunciation?

Then I look to my daughter, 13 years old, confirmed only two months ago, blithely ignorant of the hard–won concessions her mother and grandmothers struggled to secure, all too willing to waive rights whose price she cannot estimate. Once, Mary was (and often continues to be) held up by traditional religious leaders as a model of submissive piety to be emulated by good Christian women everywhere. But women like Anna Rabinowitz offer different understandings of this model.

In fact, she herself serves as a model of how women can think and can interpret ancient stories in fresh ways that take account of realities which would otherwise go ignored if viewed only through the lens of piety's idealism. These are the messy realities of bodies and sexuality and gender and reproduction, the fact of power and its exercise both to raise people up and to beat them down. As a model, Rabinowitz has the further advantage of a balanced view. She is not an iconoclast. Undergirding even her most searching words is an unmistakable reverence.

Approaching the volume's themes: the question of interruption appears in the first lines of the first poem: "It begins in a far meadow, a bright room, a hillside thick with time / A woman in a field of flowers interrupted and carried away". Traditionally, the messiah is figured as the insertion of God into history, making the timeless subject to time. But to average people (like Mary before Gabriel's appearance), the insertion stops the expected flow of time. Is it right that God should demand of a woman that she drop everything in order to gestate a heavenly child?