Poetry. Lisa Jarnot began A PRINCESS MAGIC PRESTO SPELL after the birth of her daughter, setting the modest goal of writing three words a day. Now a decade-long work-in-progress, these fragments of language are collected into a shorthand chronicle of family life that is intimate and yet open to all the world. Full of nimble transitions and non sequiturs, the poem captures the harrowing joys of parenthood alongside "funerals, dentists, divorces," in a give and take between the routine and the extraordinary.