Reading Women and Other Angels feels like eavesdropping on someone conversing with a couchful of their younger selves. Poet Kelly Burke offers us thoughtful, intimate poems that hover around the major transitions of childhood into adolescence and adolescence into adulthood. Burke’s poetry is generous, providing us time and space to sit with the questions and experiences of our youth and gently guide us through the confrontation that those questions and experiences have lasting consequences. She also takes care to explore her own journey of unlearning the insidious and devastating “lessons” Western culture does its best to instill into people assigned female at birth from essentially the second they are born.