Anne Bradstreet (née Dudley) (1612–1672) was the first North American to publish a book of poetry. Despite all odds, though from a relative place of privilege, she crafted a popular and bombastic book of poems at a time when most women could not sign their names. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) speaks to timeless concerns in formal meter: how to love and care for one another, how to fathom a relationship to the divine, and how to reconcile history and science. The Tenth Muse was popular in New England and Old, and her success was regarded as a testament to the value of the Puritan settler-colonial project in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Both her father (Thomas Dudley) and her husband (Simon Bradstreet) would serve as governors of Massachusetts, and both men devoted their lives to developing their religious utopia, using settler tactics of indigenous land dispossession to do so. While Bradstreet’s poems do not often speak directly to settler life, her literature worked in tandem with its ongoing structures in North America. Beyond her published work, many of Bradstreet’s later poems were written for family members and in response to death or trauma, such as “Verses Upon the Burning of Our House,” “In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet,” and the poems written during her husband’s extended absences. As a woman in a tightly orchestrated Puritan world, Bradstreet turned to poetry to explore life’s ambiguities and to envision the world anew.