Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles or song lines and spans more than four decades. Laconic, wry, and subtly philosophical, Kay McKenzie Cooke's new collection of poems carries us from her rural New Zealand Southland girlhood in the 1950s and 60s, to the bitter pressures of adopting out her baby as a teenager in the 1970s, to the present as grandmother, mother, wife, and author. A plain-spoken honesty, a sensitivity to the natural world, a gentle humor, a deep sense of how the richness of our relationships lodges in ordinary rituals and routines: all combine in a quietly moving autobiography. Born to a Red-Headed Woman is a documentary - vivid, ever grounded in the workaday detail of farming, the changing decades, family, city life, and job. Yet, at times, the language peels right back to the tender nerve of major formative losses. If Cooke's observations of the daily are the simple melodic lines that seem to coast on the surface, beneath that runs a rich bass line of meditation on time, on meaning, on how to live a life true to oneself and to familial love.