What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer integrates history, imagination, and lyric to recapture the life of a most remarkable woman – the seventeenth-century New England Quaker martyred for her religious faith and her courageous witness against religious persecution. In beautifully-crafted poems that speak at times through Mary Dyer’s voice, at times about or to her, this moving and intimate collection also explores how Dyer’s legacy of resistance to unjust power resonates in our contemporary world, as well as the challenges we grapple with when we attempt to know and find kinship with the distant past.