She muses on the different roles assigned to girls and boys: "boys with shellacked / faces play basketball. / Closer to god ... / they know power, / ... I begin to bleed, / am taught with the other / girls to crochet, to knit / ... Dark skein— / unraveling girl."

Contemplative and satisfying, Hamblin's observations on religion are particularly poignant, such as watching her son baptized at eight to "wash from him sins he did not commit." One of her weird sisters attempts repentance but then thinks of killing swine. Playful, full of meaning, her poems contain overlapping layers of understanding that prompt further contemplation.

Laura Hamblin is a professor of English at Utah Valley State College, where she received the 2002 Faculty Excellence Award. She also received the 1997 Eisteddfod Crown for Poetry from Brigham Young University and First Place Award in 2003 in the Utah Original Writing Competition. Her poems have been published in Green Fuse, Pegasus, Petroglyph, River Styx, Sequel, Red Rock Review, Sunstone, Wisconsin Review, and elsewhere, and her critical essays have appeared in A Companion to Jane Austen Studies and Natural History, among others. In 2003 she participated in an International Education Exchange to Hyderabad, India. She lives in Hobble Creek Canyon east of Utah Valley.