Jeanne Bryner's poems are deeply moving and often disturbing.  In "Bread and Wine: Poem for my Brothers" she recounts how her step mother kept her little brothers locked in an 8 x 10 foot room. "They grew pale as candles, heads shaved, little stick arms/fell from their shirts like Dachau's children."  Though the neighbors knew from the voices and the laundry that children were being kept in the house, they didn't call Children's Services.  The narrator-sister didn't know what to do, but now, many years later she can tell the story.  "I saw my baby brothers live the life of spiders,/ lie wingless as flies upon their beds./ And I will call their names Bread and Wine."  Much of Bryner's writing speaks of things she could not talk about before she became a writer.  As she says in "Why the Nurse Retired Early," she needed time to go over her life, to come to understand the truths she was too busy to see in the thick of things, to go "to the altar of my desk asking for words to paint what's sacred."  She tells the truth in the most exact and tough images.  They have a spiritual rightness to them, even as they make you wince.