Uncategorized – Snowflakes in a Blizzard

Watching for Dragonflies

This week’s other featured books, “When Lawyers Wept,” by Elizabeth S. Wolf, “The Fountain,” by John Maberry and “Narrow Bridge,” by Robbi Nester, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.

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THE BOOK: Watching for Dragonflies: A Caregiver’s Transformative Journey.

PUBLISHED IN: 2023

THE AUTHOR: Suzanne Marriott.

THE EDITOR: Jennifer Caven.

THE PUBLISHER: She Writes Press.

SUMMARY: Amid the many obstacles she and her husband, Michael, face after his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, Suzanne learns to be a compassionate caregiver both for him and, ultimately, for herself. Through love, psychological insights, and spiritual inquiry, she cultivates her abilities–and gains the courage to confront a medical system that saves her husband multiple times–but at other times threatens his life. Despite Michael’s many hospitalizations, he makes miraculous recoveries that bring fun and adventure back into their lives. When Suzanne faces her own medical crisis with cancer, their world is once again shaken–yet throughout it all, love is their bond, one even death cannot sever. Candid and illuminating, Suzanne’s story of growth through caregiving will appeal to anyone facing a life-changing crisis and seeking hard-won wisdom, comfort, and hope.

THE BACK STORY: I felt called to write this book for two reasons: (1) to help me understand and process my years as a caregiver and (2) to offer inspiration and companionship to other caregivers and anyone facing a life-altering challenge.

Writing my memoir took fifteen years. I began by writing my husband’s story, because, after having been so focused on him over the ten years of his illness, I was still putting his story up front. Gradually, I began to revise my book to focus on my journey, my story, about how I changed and grew during those ten years. Of course, his story is still there, but the focus shifted.

I kept detailed journals over the ten years of my caregiving journey and, after my husband’s death, these journal entries became the basis for my memoir. So, my story began with my husband’s diagnosis, and the book began shortly after his death.

My background in transpersonal psychology gave me the confidence and belief in myself that I needed to face the many challenges of caregiving. This background was indispensable in allowing me to access the spiritual and psychological resources to guide my growth as a person and as a caregiver. I was empowered by inner wisdom figures, dream revelations, and shamanic and Tibetan Buddhist practices, ones that also came to my aide when I faced my own medical crisis. This allowed me to see my cancer not as a possible death sentence but as an opportunity for growth. I utilized energy workers, hypnosis, guided imagery, and many other spiritual and psychological modalities in facing this challenge. My husband, though at that time in a wheelchair, was my rock, loving and supportive.

WHY THIS TITLE?: When my husband, Michael, was walking with the aid of two hiking poles, we took an RV trip up the coast of Northern California. When we stayed at a campground on the Eel River, he had a numinous experience with dragonflies. Because of the coolness of the water, he was able to walk unaided the short distance to the far side of the shallows. I was busy swimming against the mild current and letting the current carry me back, then doing it all over again. At one point, Michael called me over to the far bank where he was standing. When there,

I noticed he was watching a host of dragonflies flitting among the reeds, transfixed by their ever-changing iridescent colors. From that time forward, dragonflies became a symbol for him of a time when he could walk unaided, a time when he felt strong and whole. He became a watcher for dragonflies and a collector of dragonfly art, pins, and drawings.

After my husband’s death, I embraced this transformative symbol as my own, and I became the watcher for dragonflies.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Watching for Dragonflies is unique because it is my personal story of triumph over adversity. At the same time, it has universal appeal because many people have had monumental change in their lives. Hopefully, they will grow and learn as a result.

My target readers are fellow caregivers and anyone experiencing a life-changing event. My hope is that my readers will relate to my story and be inspired to persevere, to learn, and to grow.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“A moving story of love, loss, illness, and the beauty that persists.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The moving memoir Watching for Dragonflies is a wife and caregiver’s tale of contending with a spouse’s multiple sclerosis diagnosis.” —Foreword Reviews/

“I am in awe of Suzanne Marriott. . . She is a searingly honest writer who takes you into a world that is breathtaking in its intimacy, love, and lucidity. She is a deep traveler, a spiritual adventurer, and not only a survivor but a thriver. This is a no-holds-barred memoir by a woman who can lift you out of life’s tight places and help you to breathe, to flow with love, to believe.” —Judith Fein, award-winning travel journalist, author of Life is a Trip, The Spoon From Minkowitz, and How to Communicate with the Dead, teacher, speaker, and blogger about Transformative Travel for PsychologyToday.com

“In her memoir, Suzanne draws on her background in transpersonal psychology to access the spiritual and psychological resources that guide her growth as a caregiver. Empowered by inner wisdom figures, dream revelations, and shamanic and Tibetan Buddhist practices, she develops the inner resources she needs to support her husband in his battle with a chronic illness. This memoir is a gift to anyone dealing with their own feelings of grief and loss.” —Dr. Marilyn Schlitz, Professor of Transpersonal Psychology and President of the Academic Faculty at Sofia University and CEO/President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

“Watching for Dragonflies is an inspirational story of personal growth through adversity that will bring comfort and companionship to other caregivers. An intimate and empowering memoir.” —Rachel Howard, author of The Lost Night and The Risk of Us.

“In Watching for Dragonflies, Suzanne Marriott writes about her journey with her husband through the good times and the moments that challenge their relationship after his diagnosis of MS. It’s a story of love, letting go, and working together as a couple to live fully with awareness and growth on their spiritual journey of body and soul. This book is an important testament about the ups and downs of being a caregiver, and useful to anyone facing health challenges with someone they love.” —Linda Joy Myers, author The Forger of Marseille, The Power of Memoir, and Song of the Plains

“In Watching for Dragonflies, Suzanne Marriott generously shares her deeply spiritual journey as a caregiver to her husband who suffers from multiple sclerosis. In the throes of loss, disappointment, and pain, courage and love keep arising to meet each challenge. This is an honest and inspiring story of how true intimacy can help carry us through seemingly unbearable loss.” —Jim Cunningham, Physical Therapist, Marriage and Family Therapist, specializing in Trauma Resolution.

“Suzanne Marriott’s caring memoir of her love, marriage, joy, grief and spiritual seeking and of the distresses and challenges of her long caregiving is stunningly honest and inspiring.” —Judith Van Herik, Professor emerita if Religious Studies, Penn State University “Services for—and recognition of—family caregivers simply must improve. Honest storytelling like that in Watching for Dragonflies will start a revolution.” —Gretchen Staebler, author of Mother Lode: Confessions of a Reluctant Caregiver.

“Suzanne’s intimate story of living through the diagnosis, long decline and death of a loved partner helps one imagine the unimaginable in such a human way. By sharing her story, she helps us face our own fears, and to see that such challenges can bring even deeper connection.” —Kathryn McCamant, author Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves and Creating Cohousing: Building Sustainable Communities.

“Thank you for sharing your memoir with me. It’s a moving and compassionate story.” —Dr. Arthur Hastings, Professor Emeritus, Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sophia University)

“Suzanne Marriott’s touching memoir stays with the reader long after its final present-tense paragraph. This is a book that needs to be read by anyone who wishes to know what it’s like to go through the stages of a chronic illness. Along with Michael, who has MS, and Suzanne, his wife and caregiver, we experience joy in their successful activities and disappointment in the ineptness of some of their health care providers. We follow the couple through years of health challenges and learn of the events that bond them together and the mishaps that appear to tear them apart. Aided by the author’s journals, which include her dreams, we are treated to realistic descriptions of the couple’s day-to-day lives as well as Suzanne’s premonitions. A very moving, true story.” —Evelyn Kohl LaTorre, author of Love in Any Language: A Memoir of a Cross-Cultural Marriage and Between Inca Walls: A Peace Corps Memoir

“Thank you for the moving, beautiful experience.” —Mike Contino, Educator, California State University East Bay and retired Executive Secretary California Mathematics Council

AUTHOR PROFILE: Suzanne Marriott is a memoirist and deep-travel writer who shares her transformative experiences with her readers. She is a member of The Institute of Noetic Sciences, Sierra Writers, and the National Association of Memoir Writers. She lives in an ecologically conscious cohousing community in the Sierra Nevada foothills. For more information on compassionate caregiving, visit Suzanne at http://www.suzannemarriottauthor.com

AUTHOR COMMENTS: There are 53 million family caregivers in the United Sates, and many feel isolated and overwhelmed. Millions more face other life-changing events. I hope my story will inspire my readers to have faith in their ability to persevere in the face overwhelming odds. Spirituality and psychological insights are sources of strength and inspiration for many who face a life-changing crisis. I hope that by describing the varied practices that nurtured my growth, I can help readers find a method that works for them.

SAMPLE: Please refer to the Amazon page: https://www.amazon.com/Watching-Dragonflies-Caregivers-Transformative-Journey/dp/1647424364.

LOCAL OUTLETS:

The Book Seller – Grass Valley, California

https://www.thebookseller.biz

All nationwide outlets through Ingram/Publishers Group West

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Watching-Dragonflies-Caregivers-Transformative-Journey/dp/1647424364/

Bookshop.org: https://bookshop.org/p/books/watching-for-dragonflies-a-caregiver-s-transformative-journey-suzanne-marriott/18706717?ean=9781647424367 PRICE: $8.99 (ebook); $17.95 (paperback)

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

smarriottgv@gmail.com

Available for Preorder Now

http://www.facebook.com/suzannemarriottauthor

When Lawyers Wept

THE BOOK: When Lawyers Wept.

PUBLISHED IN: 2019

THE AUTHOR: Elizabeth S. Wolf.

THE EDITOR: Karen Kelsay.

THE PUBLISHER: Kelsay Books, submitted to Aldrich Press. Good group to work with and they do a fantastic job with covers.

SUMMARY: “When Lawyers Wept” is a full-length collection including the complete text of the “Did You Know?” chapbook from Rattle. This is a memoir of growing up female in the 60s & 70s including political controversies, personal revelations, and transforming relationships. It was described as “a journey from distress to redemption”. The second section, The Road of Life, continues with more loosely autobiographical poems and a selection of works prompted by stories in the news. The book closes with journal poems from a visit to China and Vietnam.

THE BACK STORY: This book was written in an urgent matter of weeks and over decades. The “Did You Know?” chapbook was inspired by a prompt for a local story slam. The first draft was completed in under 2 weeks. Once I had ripped open that vein I went back through everything I had written the past few years, after I joined an open mic group and resumed writing regularly. And then even further to poems written back in the 80s and 90s that still spoke to me. Trying to wrangle all the material into a coherent collection was a challenge. I printed everything out and used a 3-hole punch to create a draft in a big binder. Any poem that I questioned or moved more than twice got ripped out. The manuscript acceptance was a highlight of my life. Also, the cover features a stock photo that looks remarkably like my daughter and was taken at the Boston subway stop near my father’s old law firm. It’s like a personal wrinkle in time.

WHY THIS TITLE?: The title is taken from the poem “July 1993” describing a breakfast that truly shifted my perspective. It’s a phrase that summed up so much of my experience and includes words not usually found in close proximity. What can I say, it’s a mood.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? This book is for women who persist. It shows what came before and why we are still carrying on. It’s personal, political, therapeutic, and educational for those who weren’t there and those who maybe still are. The span includes my mother, born in the Great Depression, to my daughter, born the week after Columbine.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“I enjoy collections of poetry, but usually you browse a bit, reading the ones that appeal to you, then go back to it when you have a bit of time… but “When Lawyers Wept” is like a gripping autobiography of shocking sad events, out of which — incredibly — the poet finds strength and even humor. This is not like any collection of poetry I have ever read, I could NOT put it down. Highly recommended!” —Robin Stratton, Big Table Publishing

“Did You Know? is a collection of powerful poems describing an almost unbelievable journey. The language is clear and concise, resulting in an even more potent impact. Men—educated, respected and successful—make decisions about the women in their lives with calamitous consequences. This is a riveting narrative, from start to finish, that compels the reader to devour it non-stop. Many poems are touching, poignant, and often disturbing. None will remain untouched at the conclusion of this remarkable literary odyssey of re-opened wounds and healing” —Lainie Senechal, first Poet Laureate of Amesbury, MA, and co-founder, Tapestry of Voices

AUTHOR PROFILE: Elizabeth S. Wolf (she, her) always wanted to be a writer. Then there was a long pause while she was a working single parent. The lull ended when, in between jobs, she found a community open-mic poetry group that met every week. In the past 5 years, Elizabeth has published 4 books of poetry with 3 different presses as well as poems and stories in magazines and anthologies.

Early in the pandemic, Elizabeth’s daughter invited her to donate copies of her chapbook to Prisoner Express. Included with the book were prompts and an invitation for the readers to write their own stories. Over the next year, Elizabeth read hand-written submissions from prisoners all over the country. Several of those prisoner poems ended up featured in Rattle magazine Tribute to Prisoner Express. The prompts are also included as part of the Writers On The Moon collection to be archived on the moon (yes really).

Collaborating with her daughter again in 2023, Elizabeth edited a collection of poems based on a series of workshops held at a boarding house for vulnerable kids in rural Ghana. Her 5th book is now a fundraiser for the Mako Children’s Fund. Find more information and order books from her Amazon page at https://www.amazon.com/author/esw

AUTHOR COMMENTS: This book is my personal exposition on the lyric “what a long, strange trip it’s been”. Crossing decades, generations, and continents, exploring my life and others, these are the stories I needed to tell. SAMPLE: My books and links to collections including stories and poems are on my Amazon page at https://www.amazon.com/author/esw

LOCAL OUTLETS: Jabberwocky Bookshop, Newburyport MA (a fabulous indie bookstore)

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: https://kelsaybooks.com/products/when-lawyers-wept https://www.amazon.com/When-Lawyers-Wept-Elizabeth-Wolf/dp/1950462242/ https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/when-lawyers-wept-elizabeth-s-wolf/1133445248

PRICE: $18.50

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Follow me on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/author/esw, on Goodreads at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/14985922.Elizabeth_S_Wolf, or find me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/elizabeth.wolf.7792

The Fountain

THE BOOK: The Fountain

PUBLISHED IN: July, 2017

THE AUTHOR: John Maberry

THE EDITOR: Michelle Proulx did some helpful copy editing. She’s also a writer.

THE PUBLISHER: Eagle Peak Press

SUMMARY: A seven-story collection of fantasy and science fiction short stories. The back story offers more clues.

THE BACK STORY: Back in the day, the author watched “The Twilight Zone.” He also read many Carlos Castaneda books. Those sparked the theme and painful end to the leadoff story, “The Fountain.”

Like everyone, the author has seen or read much about vampires. He also has a loved one with a fairly common digestive disorder prevented by a pill. Voila, “Alfred’s Rare Blood Disorder.”

A family adopts a Golden Retriever. The author’s daughter had one, so he knows all about them. What if the family adopted one with some special talents? Find out in “Lily, an Amazing Dog.”

Perhaps Through the Looking Glass, influenced “The Closet Door.” It’s set in coastal Maine, a place where the author’s family spent some time. Dan sees an unfamiliar face in the vacation cottage mirror—a parallel universe with a twist.

Wizards, a common theme. An aging wizard must do a good deed to free himself from an oath he made to a ruler. But some spells don’t always work out the way you wished in “The Wizard.”

The Outer Banks of North Carolina, another frequent vacation spot for the author’s family, is the setting for “The Flame.” He never saw any flames rising from the water but the thought popped into his head one night for a story line.

Yes, Fribble rhymes with Tribble for all you Trekkies. But it’s unlike a Tribble. An odd first encounter, with a somewhat bored and burned out pharmaceutical company employee. “The Fribble” is a story that may be continued in a novella if popular demand ensues.

WHY THIS TITLE: It’s the lead story in the collection—a modern day plunderer looking for fortune meets a long-dead shaman. Karmic consequences ensue.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT: Four and five stars on Amazon. Don’t have or want to take the time to read a novel? Then a collection of short stories allows easy stops and starts—on the bus or train, the waiting room or wherever. If you like fantasy or sci-fi, then this is for you. It has humor, twists and turns. A mix of times and places with current or retro themes and characters.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

Nicholas Rossis, author of several science fiction series, says, “I wonder if The Fountain’s stories should be labeled speculative or science fiction, as they remind me more of Twilight Zone and less of Philip K. Dick. Maybe that’s the best definition of them; the common ground between these works. Whichever it is, I enjoyed them and their twists. Maberry writes in a clear way that immerses the reader into the story. He has a gift for creating easily identifiable characters who feel familiar after just a few lines. All in all, a fine collection for those who enjoy their short stories with a twist.

“A great read!” says D.G. Kaye, author of several nonfiction books. “If you enjoy short stories in fantasy/sci-fi genres, and stories that make you think then look no further than Maberry’s tales which will engross you with stories about karma, greed, time travel, aliens and muses. . . Maberry is a prolific writer who knows how to keep a reader captivated till the end and finishes his stories with an unexpected twist.”

“Clever set of short stories,” says Wesley Higaki. “The Fountain is a collection of six science fiction and fantasy short stories by John Maberry. I like the simple, whimsical style of these stories. Each is a clever story that ends with abrupt, but clever, plot twists. The characters are realistic and interesting; their interactions are believable.”

June Randolph says, “If you love stories with a surprise at the end, you will love these. Some are ironic, some cautionary, and some funny. A delight for the gray matter. Perhaps my favorite was Alfred’s Strange Blood Disorder. I laughed the hardest at that one.”

AUTHOR PROFILE: John Maberry dreamed of being a writer from second grade. Life got in his way. Like what, you may ask. Find out the details in Waiting for Westmoreland, the memoir he wrote about how he came to have a happy and successful life. That, after surviving a hard childhood, failed marriages, an eye opening year in Vietnam and more. He finished the memoir five years after retiring from a local government job in busy Northern Virginia.

That’s John in the photo, relaxing with his friend Larry the Lizard. He met Larry in Mimbres, New Mexico. John and his wife relocated to scenic New Mexico in 2011. That move and other priorities, stalled the transition to speculative fiction, mysteries and other writing genres. The Fountain, came out in July 2017. The Tenth Anniversary Edition of Waiting for Westmoreland followed in September 2017.

He’s working on a short story collections and novels now. Jumped by a Deadly Cholla, a fantasy and science fiction anthology, came out in April 2023. A sci-fi mystery will be out in 2024, along with a nonfiction assortment of the best of Eagle Peak Press articles.

When not working on the novels or the websites, the family enjoys life in their dream home high atop a hill. His wife of 40+ years has her quilting/craft room. He has an office shared with an energetic dog who lounges on a loveseat behind him when not out chasing rabbits. He’s a happy man and a funny guy (strange/weird his wife says).

AUTHOR COMMENTS: Finally on to fiction! The short stories were fun—indulging myself in varying subject lines, themes and characters. I like twists and humor. You’ll see if you read them.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: Here’s the opening two paragraphs from “Lily, an Amazing Dog.”

The first incident came on a morning walk past the retirement home, along a tree-lined boulevard. A flash of sun off a sliding glass door across the street caught Roger’s eye. A lady in a green dress stepped through the door onto her fifth floor balcony. She smiled and waved, seeing Lily with her plushy frog. It’s a retriever thing—Goldens can go nowhere without carrying something in their mouth. The matron began watering a potted ficus. He looked away momentarily.

A loud sound of rending metal drew his attention back to the building. With silver hair streaming and dress flapping like a flag in a stiff wind, the woman plunged from the collapsing balcony. Lily barked at the sight, dropping her frog. In that brief moment, a shimmer appeared in the air. The woman disappeared into the flickering space, never hitting the ground. Lily barked again, before picking up her frog and moving on with the walk as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

LOCAL OUTLETS: It’s Kindle only; too short for paper so no outlets other than Amazon. But it’s available in all the countries Amazon serves.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Nowhere else, sorry.

PRICE: Regularly $2.99–$.99–from June 2nd, at 8am to 4pm on the 5th PDT $1.99 4pm on the 5th to 12am on the 9th

SALES LINKS: The Fountain and more–seven short stories

Find out more about the author at these places:

Narrow Bridge

THE BOOK: Narrow Bridge,

PUBLISHED IN: 2019.

THE AUTHOR: Robbi Nester.

THE PUBLISHER: Main Street Rag, a small publisher located in North Carolina.

SUMMARY: Narrow Bridge is a collection of poetry. That means it doesn’t have a plot, as a novel does. The individual poems may tell stories, and my poems frequently do. But the book as a whole, though it is divided into sections, does not necessarily have an overall theme or narrative. At most, it has an arc. Some books of poetry have definite themes, and a strong arc that moves them forward. Consider Julia Dasbach’s Kolchinsky’s new book of poems, 40 Weeks (YesYes, 2023), which follows the progress of the writer’s second pregnancy, week by week. Or Victoria Chang’s collection, Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020), consisting of poems written in a form inspired by newspaper obituaries, which tracks the poet’s mourning process following the death of her mother. This book doesn’t have a theme like that, but it has patterns that return again and again. A number of the poems are about women and being female. Some are about the imaginary or legendary—a whale that sings the world into being or a predator-mermaid in love with her prey. There are also autobiographical poems about growing up in Philadelphia and poems about the natural world.

THE BACK STORY: I write poems all the time, at least a few a week. After a year or two or three, I begin to gather them together, trying to discern in them some kind of pattern that would make them a book. Since most of the poems were written in the same general time and place, there are probably going to be some concerns that unify them. The task then is to create an artful collection out of this raw material, to give it a title and a shape, and include only the strongest poems that belong to this group.

WHY THIS TITLE There is a story behind the title Narrow Bridge that most people would not know. Narrow Bridge is a song and a prayer based on a maxim by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlov. Nachman was a Chasidic Rabbi who lived in what is now Slovakia in the 18th and early 19th century. He was known for the stories he told and his pithy sayings. One of the most famous of these goes: “The world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid.” Many of the world’s dangers were on my mind when I wrote these poems, from the rising antisemitism and racism I saw in this country to climate change and the everyday dangers life always presents, illness, death, childhood trauma, and plain bad luck.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Even though my background and ethnicity may be different from many of my readers’, there is much in these poems that readers will be able to relate to: from poems about my parents to those about early years of school and the natural world, there is something here for every reader of poetry.

REVIEW COMMENTS: A number of people have reviewed the book, but the book’s blurbs sum up quite well what the poems are like. Here are a couple of them: Barbara Crooker, a poet I very much admire, commented: ”Carefully crafted, beautifully written, these poems are a bridge indeed between this world and the one that shimmers just beyond us. In one poem, the narrator is a small child trying to capture the moon in her mirror; when that fails, she catches it in a net of word, and that is what Nester does throughout this book in poem after gorgeous heart-breaking poem. These are poems that “sing for the joy of being heard.” Sonia Greenfield, another poet I admire, says: “Nester’s poems […] are either huge in scope as they needle at the very meaning of existence or they’re faded snapshots sharpened by language into clear renderings of a girl’s life. Once you read a Nester metaphor, you can’t imagine any other way to see a thing: “knees like doorknobs,” or “mute as the inside of a bell” or “the tongue…a bathmat in the red and white sauna of the mouth.” Indeed, the imagery in Narrow Bridge will linger with you—Nester, like the leviathan of this collection’s first poem, is “singing the world into being.

AUTHOR PROFILE: I’m a retired teacher, at least technically retired. In truth though, I never stopped teaching. I am always telling people stories about things, just as I did when I was in the classroom. It is my way of communicating, and it’s what I do when I write as well. I spent a lot of time in school, getting two Master’s degrees in Creative Writing (an MA at Hollins College/University and an MFA at UC Irvine) and a PhD in Comparative Literature. And I spent a lot of time in the classroom, but it wasn’t till I retired that I had time to devote to publishing books. In 2012, I published my first book, Balance (White Violet), a chapbook that follows a sequence of Iyengar yoga poses. In 2014, my first full collection, A Likely Story, was published by Moon Tide Press. The second collection, Other-Wise, was published by Kelsay Books in 2017. Kelsay also edits the White Violet imprint, so this was the second book of mine she published. I also edited 3 anthologies of poetry. All of them were ekphrastic in some way. Ekphrastic poetry is work explicitly about other works of art. These books were The Liberal Media Made Me Do It!, (Nine Toes, 2014) which collected work about shows and stories on public media like NPR and PBS. Over the Moon: Birds, Beasts, and Trees (http://www.poemeleon.org/over-the-moon-birds-beasts-and/) is a collection of poems about photographs by the wonderful Beth Moon. Because I could not afford to buy the rights to use her photographs, the book employed links to images on the Internet, and was published online as a special issue of the journal Poemeleon in 2017. In 2021, the editor of this journal, Cati Porter, collaborated with me to produce a pandemic anthology about online museums of all kinds, The Plague Papers( https://poemeleon.me/plague-papers) , which was published again as a special issue of Poemeleon. Again, many of the images in the book could not have been otherwise reproduced. There are links that take readers to the museums and works in question.

SAMPLE:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzkJWqSJcrw Catch and Release .

Catch and Release

As a child, I’d take long car rides
with my parents. Bored with the miles,
the tedium of being an only child,
I would play a game of my devising,
\tipping a small round mirror to the sky,
trying to capture the moon.
I thought if I could catch it
in the frame of this small mirror,
make it stay. I could keep it
captive in a jar, as I had butterflies
and moths, fireflies flashing,
their sullen yellow signals.
I marveled that it followed us
even as we crossed the border
into Canada. It fled my mirror too
bound to earth, I had to
let ig go, until this moment,
when I catch it in a net
of words and hold it
for awhile, before it sails away.

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You can buy my book on the publisher’s website (https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/narrow-bridge-robbi-nester/). If you live near Los Angeles, it’s also available at Beyond Baroque’s Bookstore, https://www.beyondbaroque.org/bookstorelanding.html. In Tustin, CA, it’s at Arvada Bookstore, https://arvidabookco.com/. I am sure there are used copies out there as well, and the book is also available from me.

PRICE: $14.+ shipping

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: I welcome readers to have a look at my webpage, http://www.robbinester.net, where they can leave me a message I will respond to.

I am also on Facebook and on Linked In.

Weather Report, May 29

(Dragonfly photo from Earth.com).

NOTE: I’m taking off next week for vacation, so the next Snowflakes in a Blizzard edition after today will be June 13.

Our currently featured books, “Things We Should Have Taught You in High School, But Never Did,” by Richard Gary Shear, “Blown Away,” by Richard Boothby and “A Higher Standard,” by E.F. Dodd, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.

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UPCOMING ON SNOWFLAKES IN A BLIZZARD, MAY 30-JUNE 12

“WATCHING FOR DRAGONFLIES,” BY SUZANNE MARRIOTT.

Amid the many obstacles she and her husband, Michael, face after his diagnosis with multiple sclerosis, Suzanne learns to be a compassionate caregiver both for him and, ultimately, for herself. Through love, psychological insights, and spiritual inquiry, she cultivates her abilities–and gains the courage to confront a medical system that saves her husband multiple times–but at other times threatens his life. Despite Michael’s many hospitalizations, he makes miraculous recoveries that bring fun and adventure back into their lives. When Suzanne faces her own medical crisis with cancer, their world is once again shaken–yet throughout it all, love is their bond, one even death cannot sever. Candid and illuminating, Suzanne’s story of growth through caregiving will appeal to anyone facing a life-changing crisis and seeking hard-won wisdom, comfort, and hope.

“WHEN LAWYERS WEPT,” BY ELIZABETH S. WOLF.

“When Lawyers Wept” is a full-length collection including the complete text of the “Did You Know?” chapbook from Rattle. This is a memoir of growing up female in the 60s & 70s including political controversies, personal revelations, and transforming relationships. It was described as “a journey from distress to redemption”. The second section, The Road of Life, continues with more loosely autobiographical poems and a selection of works prompted by stories in the news. The book closes with journal poems from a visit to China and Vietnam./

“THE FOUNTAIN,” BY JOHN MABERRY.

Writes one reviewer: “I wonder if The Fountain’s stories should be labeled speculative or science fiction, as they remind me more of Twilight Zone and less of Philip K. Dick. Maybe that’s the best definition of them; the common ground between these works. Whichever it is, I enjoyed them and their twists. Maberry writes in a clear way that immerses the reader into the story. He has a gift for creating easily identifiable characters who feel familiar after just a few lines. All in all, a fine collection for those who enjoy their short stories with a twist.”

“NARROW BRIDGE,” BY ROBBI NESTER

Writes Robbi: “There is a story behind the title Narrow Bridge that most people would not know. Narrow Bridge is a song and a prayer based on a maxim by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlov. Nachman was a Chasidic Rabbi who lived in what is now Slovakia in the 18th and early 19th century. He was known for the stories he told and his pithy sayings. One of the most famous of these goes: “The world is a narrow bridge, and the important thing is not to be afraid.” Many of the world’s dangers were on my mind when I wrote these poems, from the rising antisemitism and racism I saw in this country to climate change and the everyday dangers life always presents, illness, death, childhood trauma, and plain bad luck.”

Everything We Should Have Taught You in High School, But Never Did

This week’s other featured books, “Blown Away,” by Richard Boothby and “A Higher Standard,” by E.F Dodd, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.

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THE BOOK: Everything We Should Have Taught You in High School, But Never Did

PUBLISHED IN: 2023

THE AUTHOR: Dr. Richard Gary Shear.

THE EDITOR: Patricia B. Molloy.

THE PUBLISHER: The ShearAdvantage Inc.

SUMMARY: Lessons that have led a generation of students to become leaders, achieve personal happiness, and live life filled with joy.

High School teaches how to determine the area of a room, but not how to navigate the people and personalities you will find in that room. In school, you are exposed to the cataclysmic events of history, but rarely about the life struggles you’ll experience. Award-winning educator Dr. Richard Gary Shear has learned these lessons from decades of experience and research. Everything We Should Have Taught You in High School, But Never Did is a must-read for new graduates and people of all ages, revealing important life insights, such as:

Learning the Two Secrets to Success

·How to Create the Rules of Life So You Win

·What Happy People Have in Common

·The Importance of Self Kindness

·How to Keep Your Dreams Alive

·A Guide on How to Find the Right Answers

·The Superpower of a Positive Attitude and Temperament

THE BACK STORY: There are more than 24,000 high schools in the United States. Each year thousands of principals give their graduation address to their students on their final day together. Most speeches are nice and offer some interesting quotes and phrases. However, few actually provide meaningful, life-changing advice. As I was writing a graduation address to my students, I reflected on all the things we never got a chance to teach them. I thought about how I would have valued knowing more about life on my graduation day. As a result, I crafted the graduation address for the four high schools I was lucky enough to serve as principal based on the last lesson of high school, Everything We Should Have Taught You in High School, But Never Did. For example, I advised the students on the power of perseverance. having a positive attitude, the importance of forgiveness, and much, much more.

WHY THIS TITLE?: The title tells it all. Important life lessons and wisdom that we should have taught you, but all too often never had the time. WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? The book contains more than 70 wisdom tips based on what I observed over a four-decade career of helping young people through their high school years and into a successful life. Although it is designed for recent high school students, the wisdom chapters are easy to read, helpful to people of all ages, and contain significant life tips.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Simply written, a veteran high school principal distills understandings about life that students can beneficially carry with them after graduation. Short and to the point, this is a truly helpful book.” — Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D.

“Having been the principal of four high schools, Richard Gary Shear shares lessons about how to keep dreams alive, what happy people have in common, and the “superpower” of having a positive attitude and temperament. The book is appropriate for people of all ages.” – CafeMom

AUTHOR PROFILE: Richard Gary Shear is an award-winning educator who has served as the principal of four separate high schools. His students are still part of his life, inviting him to attend family events decades after they first met him as an educational leader. He lives on Long Island with his wife. His son is an educator residing in Connecticut. Dr. Shear has advised on key educational issues to leading universities, state and national conferences and school districts. He was the lead author in the critically acclaimed book “Screwed Up School Reform: Fixing America’s Broken Promise. A book that emphasized that we approach students as things that need manipulation to learn. The truth is that students love to learn and schools that lead with love and make school a joyful place will have outstanding results. Dr. Shear has always believed that people make programs. He states that he has never seen a broken program that couldn’t be fixed by a great leader, and he has never seen a great program that couldn’t be ruined by the wrong people. AUTHOR COMMENTS: Every young person will benefit from life advice. As we go through life, we wish we knew at a younger age about what successful people have in common, how to enjoy life, how to prioritize the most important moments and much more.

SAMPLE: The Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Should-Taught-School-Never/dp/B0BZFNXQDZ

WHERE TO BUY IT: The book is available online from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/everything-we-should-have-taught-you-in-high-school-but-never-did-richard-gary-shear/1143303767 https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Should-Taught-School-Never/dp/B0BZFNXQDZ

PRICE: $12.95

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Dr. Shear can be contacted at RShear3@verizon.net

Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son’s Suicide

THE BOOK: Blown Away: Refinding Life After My Son’s Suicide.

PUBLISHED IN: 2022.

THE AUTHOR: Richard Boothby.

PUBLISHER: Other Press.

SUMMARY: This book is a father’s memoir about the death of his only child. In despair over an intractable heroin addiction, my son killed himself. The narrative of Blown Away is composed of two main strands; a handful of diary-like entries recounting the week after my son’s death, braided together with a series of chapters that recount my soul-searching sessions with a psychoanalyst in which I struggled to make sense of what happened.

As the book unfolds, the dark theme of shock and loss slowly gives way to a brighter and brighter sense of light and new life. At the end, the desperate desire to know what had happened, to take some solace in understanding, is displaced by a liberating and deeply meaningful sense of what is and will always remain unknown in our relations with those we most deeply love. The result is a quiet but transformative sense of what makes life worth living. As one reviewer said of the book: “Those who traverse this memoir will gain a hard-won new appreciation of what truly matters in life.” And another: “The sometimes shocking intimacy of the book makes it a true universal masterpiece.”

A last personal note: Blown Away is a good deal shorter than it may appear deom the sheer number of pages, because the print is so large.

THE BACK STORY: The phone call came in the middle of the night. My 23 year old son, Oliver, had shot himself to death. After absorbing the shattering wave of horror and grief, wandering around a familiar world suddenly become impossibly strange, I began writing about it. It felt like a mortal necessity. To write was to survive. I desperately needed to understand how we had come to such a terrible event, and to face what role I might have played in it. I was invaded by a vague but potent sense of guilt. The memoir explores all that, but the book is also a sustained tribute to a deep love of an exceptional young man who, before he was taken by addiction and death, lived a brief but rich and wonderful life.

After writing the first draft in a kind of fever, I returned to the text over and over again, substantively altering it each time. Through fully 15 years of such revisions, the book became less a narrative of pain than of love, less a story about death than about new life.

WHY THIS TITLE?: Editors at Other Press, which published the book, paused briefly before the violent tone of the title, but finally accepted “Blown Away” for its power to capture the life-threatening anguish left behind by the suicide of a loved one. But the real pay-off of this book lies in another meaning of “Blown Away,” which points neither to violence nor to anguish but rather to our capacity to “refind life” even when tragedy threatens to destroy us. As I had learned at college in the seventies, we can be genuinely “blown away” by a radical realization.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? Blown Away is too honest to offer any shallow and predictable consolation in the face of death, but the real value of its deep dive into a father-son relationship broken by the son’s suicide lies in its capacity to illuminate the foundations of love, leaving the reader with a greater appreciation of love’s complexities, and its mysteries.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“How one survives the death of a child is unimaginable, especially by suicide. But Blown Away brings one into this experience as closely as anyone would hope to go. But it is more than that…it is also a tale of acceptance, of healing, of hope and of giving and receiving loving support. It is a very moving story, beautifully written in a profoundly personal way…a testament to the human spirit’s ability to accept death and embrace life and go on. Inspiration for anyone, I believe. Highly recommended.” ––Anonymous Amazon reader

Blown Away takes us into the worst possible experience of loss and shows how we can emerge out of it with a new understanding of ourselves and how we relate to others. This is at once a difficult read and an uplifting one. It takes us on an incredible journey that ends up being directly applicable to our own lives. The courage of the author is evident on every page. He has written a book that is impossible to put down. I read the whole thing straight through without noticing anything happening around me. It’s the most powerful memoir that I’ve ever read. ––Anonymous Amazon reader

“Blown Away is a remarkable account of grief and recovery—searing, heartfelt, profoundly honest and dare I say, interesting. The best writing is always at the core, exploration. This is an epic excavation. What’s most satisfying here is the hyper-focus of the lens, the recalibration that cumulatively allows us to come to a new understanding of the experiential world of evolving self-awareness, loss and finally love.” ––Karen Fish, author of No Chronology

“A soul-piercing account of loss and its miraculous transformation into new life, even creativity. Boothby’s autobiography of grappling with his son’s addiction and suicide grabs the reader from the first paragraph and gathers force from one page to the next. This book is the most compelling, desperately honest rendering of heartbreak and redemption I have come across: its power is undeniable. It is a gift to anyone who has ever truly suffered.” –– Mari Ruti, Distinguished Professor, University of Toronto

AUTHOR PROFILE: I have spent almost forty years teaching Philosophy at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore. My primary research has focused on the intersection of psychoanalytic theory with currents of contemporary continental philosophy. Resorting to a psychoanalyst in the midst of my insanity of grief was therefore a doubly strange turn. What had been an intellectual interest suddenly felt like a matter of life and death.

In my academic work, I have published four books. Among them is a book pretty exclusively for scholars entitled Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (Routledge, 2001). But I have also worked hard to write in ways that will make valuable sense for a more popular audience. One of those more accessible books came out twenty years ago: Sex on the Couch: What Freud Still Has to Teach Us About Sex and Gender (Routledge, 2025).

For fully a decade after my son’s death, I found it impossible to write anything scholarly, but my latest return to writing was energized Oliver’s memory. The experience of losing him eventually inspired in me a radically new interpretation of the religious impulse. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred was published in 2022.

When I’m not busy teaching or writing, I enjoy being an amateur sculptor in wood, stone, and plaster. I’m also a passionate—passionate but far from perfect!)— squash player, and, despite my love of Baltimore, I’ve spent most of the past dozen summers voyaging up the coast with my adventurous wife to my birthplace in Maine aboard a small sailboat.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: Blown Away is an intensely personal work, but it is also deeply relevant to the tragic epidemics of addiction and suicide that now afflict millions of American families. It is also a deeply philosophical work. The self-exploration unfolded in Blown Away introduces an unexpected and paradoxical appreciation of role of unknowing, a confrontation with the limits of our understanding, in love, life, and death.

WHERE TO BUY IT: Blown Away is available in hardcover from Amazon with a number of reviews from both writers and readers.

PRICE. $13.64.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: Richard Boothby can be reached by email at boothby@loyola.edu

A Higher Standard

THE BOOK: A Higher Standard

PUBLISHED IN: May 16, 2023

THE AUTHOR: E.F. Dodd

THE EDITOR: Betsy Thorpe and Karli Jackson

THE PUBLISHER: Sugar Beaver Books, LLC.

SUMMARY: As one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors, real estate developer Gideon West has the golden touch, both with the ladies-from Beacon Hill to Southie and all points in between-and every project he’s helmed for Standard Development. Hungry for his next challenge, he’s set his sights on the untapped potential in the rolling hills and tranquil farmland of the sleepy town of Mimosa, North Carolina. To confirm it’s the idyllic perfection it appears to be, Gideon heads south, where he’s enveloped in Southern hospitality by everyone and everything with the exception of two: Monty, a runaway horse, and Everest Kennedy, an emerald-eyed spitfire who can knock everything he’s working toward right on its axis.

Everest’s life in her hometown of Mimosa revolves around one thing-the equine rescue she’s scrimped and saved for and struggled to get off the ground since college. After years of work, Second Chance Farms can finally stand on its own four hooves. What she needs now is the ability to expand her little slice of paradise by buying the hundred acres next door-that Gideon has under contract. There’s no way she’s going to let Gideon West upend everything she’s worked for, regardless of the fact she appears to be the only one immune to the spell of the silver-tongued developer. But with each dimpled grin and blue-eyed glance, Everest can’t deny her resistance to his charm is waning. If she isn’t careful, Gideon might turn her carefully planned world upside down.

Even worse is that maybe – just maybe – she wants him to.

THE BACK STORY: I adopted an English Bulldog from a rescue in August of 2021. The work that goes into these rescues is unreal, as is the dedication of the volunteers who run them. So, that’s where the idea of Second Chance Farms came from. My characters introduce themselves to me at random times through snippets of stories that pop in my head. There will be a concept that appeals to me and then, when I play it out, that’s when the characters start to take shape. For this book, I had a playboy hero in my head and knew he needed a no-nonsense lady to bring him back down to earth. At the same time, my heroine needed someone to help her develop a life outside of work. Enter Everest and Gideon!

WHY THIS TITLE?:This is the first book in the Standard of Love Series. The “standard” in the title of the book comes from Gideon’s company, Standard Development.

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? This book should appeal to someone who enjoys the concept of finding that special someone you never knew you wanted, but who turns out to be completely perfect for you. Neither character imagined meeting someone like the other, because they lead such different lives. But, fate intervenes and puts them in each other’s path. There’s so much humor that comes from their interactions and growing feelings, as well. If you like rom-coms with the right amount of steam, you’ll like this book.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“A charming romance of seemingly mismatched partners rendered with wit and heart.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Fans of enemies-to-lovers romances will smile through this one, especially if they love horses.” – BookLife Review

“Heartwarming and humorous, this book will leave romance readers eager for more.” – Blue Ink Review

“A Higher Standard is a well-written and engaging romantic tale that will satisfy readers with its modern setting, tantalizing interactions, and heart-warming ending.” – IndieReader

AUTHOR PROFILE: Like her heroines, E.F. Dodd came from a close-knit family in a small town in North Carolina. Although she dallied briefly with city life, she retreated back to the country, where she now lives with her long-time boyfriend and an English bulldog. From a young age, she enjoyed creating stories, including the time at five years old when she’d almost convinced her grandmother that she’d gone horseback riding all alone… until she added a friendly crab to the storyline. With age came wisdom and the understanding of how far to stretch a plotline. Now she pursues writing as a creative outlet and hopes, one day, to have this be her career instead of a pastime.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: We live in a world that puts increasing pressure on women to take on more, to do more and that if they either refuse to do so, or ask for help, that’s a sign of weakness. It’s not. It’s okay to ask for – and accept – help and it’s okay to delegate tasks and not try to do everything yourself. People will be there for you if you let them.

WHERE TO BUY IT:

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop.org

PRICE: $14.95 paperback | $4.99 eBook

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:

Connect with Dodd at www.efdoddwrites.com and on Instagram @e.f.dodd.–

Weather Report, May 22

(Memorial Day photo from Unsplash)

Our currently featured books, “Only.” by Rebecca Foust, “Girl Country,” by Jacqueline Vogtman, “Be Brave, Lose the Beige,” by Liz Kitchens and “A Long Time Dead,” by Samara Breger, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.

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UPCOMING ON SNOWFLAKES IN A BLIZZARD, MAY 23-29.

“EVERYTHING WE SHOULD HAVE TAUGHT YOU IN HIGH SCHOOL, BUT NEVER DID,” BY RICHARD GARY SHEAR

“BLOWN AWAY,” BY RICHARD BOOTHBY.

The phone call came in the middle of the night. My 23 year old son, Oliver, had shot himself to death. After absorbing the shattering wave of horror and grief, wandering around a familiar world suddenly become impossibly strange, I began writing about it. It felt like a mortal necessity. To write was to survive. I desperately needed to understand how we had come to such a terrible event, and to face what role I might have played in it. I was invaded by a vague but potent sense of guilt. The memoir explores all that, but the book is also a sustained tribute to a deep love of an exceptional young man who, before he was taken by addiction and death, lived a brief but rich and wonderful life.

“A HIGHER STANDARD,” BY E.F. DODD,

As one of Boston’s most eligible bachelors, real estate developer Gideon West has the golden touch, both with the ladies-from Beacon Hill to Southie and all points in between-and every project he’s helmed for Standard Development. Hungry for his next challenge, he’s set his sights on the untapped potential in the rolling hills and tranquil farmland of the sleepy town of Mimosa, North Carolina. To confirm it’s the idyllic perfection it appears to be, Gideon heads south, where he’s enveloped in Southern hospitality by everyone and everything with the exception of two: Monty, a runaway horse, and Everest Kennedy, an emerald-eyed spitfire who can knock everything he’s working toward right on its axis.

Even worse is that maybe – just maybe – she wants him to.

Only

This week’s other featured books, “Girl Country,” by Jacqueline Vogtman, “Be Brave, Lose the Beige,” by Liz Kitchens and “A Long Time Dead,” by Samara Breger, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name om our Authors page.

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THE BOOK: ONLY

PUBLISHED IN: 2022

THE AUTHOR: Rebecca Foust

THE EDITOR: Martha Rhodes.

THE PUBLISHER: Four Way Books, https://fourwaybooks.com/site/

SUMMARY: ONLY collects 43 free verse and fixed form poems that grapple with the challenges of the contemporary world from various perspectives: daughter, sister, wife, mother, former lawyer, activist for students with learning challenges, woman, and citizen of a flawed and declining empire. Grounded in family and community, the poems love and appreciate nature while grappling with climate change, social injustice, and our broken political systems. Here you will find work about parenting children who are not neuro- or gender-typical, family function and dysfunction, sexuality and gender, and more generally, what it means to be human in world that often feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. ONLY also celebrates life, how it persists, how we harry each other and carry each other through troubled times and are able, sometimes to pause to take notice of beauty, and love.

PRESS DESCRIPTION: Urgent from the outset, Rebecca Foust’s ONLY insists that the only thing worth writing about is everything. Prompted to confront what she does not know, the speaker lists, “Null. All. What’s after death or before.” This book scales the cliff-face of adulthood, that paradoxical ascent in which the longer we live the less we know of life, in which we find that each of us is only ourselves and yet delicately interconnected with everyone, everything, else. These candid lyrics ponder our broken political systems, family (dys)function and parenting challenges, divergent and intersecting identities, the complexities of sexuality and gender, natural refuge and climate catastrophe, and in general what it means to be human in a world that sometimes feels as if it is approaching apocalypse. At the ledge of this abyss, however, Foust reminds us of the staggering beauty of life, the legacies of survival in the echoes of care that outlast us: “I came / to the canyon rim and saw // how best to carry you: I let the stone go.”

THE BACK STORY: This is my 7th (4th full-length) book, poems written mostly before the pandemic and its losses. The first draft, assembled in 2015 while I was the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at The Frost Place, looked like this:

WHY THIS TITLE: The title poem, “Only,” felt right for representing the spiritus of the book as a whole. Also, when I subjected the manuscript to a “word map” analysis, I noticed that the word “only” showed a very high prevalence. In fact, some versions of the ms had that word somewhere in every poem. I like the many meanings of “only”—from paramount and singular (as in “you are the only one for me”) all the way down to something diminutive (“only a scratch”) or disjunctive (“only, I was not saying that.”) The more I thought about the word, the more capacious and appropriate it felt for this ms.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT. Content plus craft. It covers broad territory, and I hope succeeds in my ambition to have each poem have something of merit to say to everyone, that is, be universal. I care a lot about craft and poured everything I know and have learned into making the work shine. Publisher’s Weekly gave it a starred review, and it earned Second Place for the 2022 Royal Dragonfly Award and is a Longlist Finalist for Julie Suk Book Prize from Jacar Press.

BACK COVER BLURBS:

Rebecca Foust’s new book, ONLY, is her most masterful work to date. Here are forty-two poems full of music, precision, and what range—from the haunted thrill “through moonlight and smoke” of skating on a lake at night, to field-stripping an M-16, to sitting with loved ones through births and final illnesses alike. In Foust’s hands the hard work of memory—each fossil, each word and gesture—is sometimes balanced and sometimes in tension with the echoes of what we must lose. “I remember all the words,” she writes in one poem; and in the next, “I let the stone go.” Insoluble, this give and take, and yet the music made from the gifts and griefs of a life is Rebecca Foust’s deepest source both of clarity and of nuance, “the language of living, and its aftermath.” —David Baker

In ONLY, her luminous new collection of poems, Rebecca Foust’s gifts are in full flower. Richly imagistic and achingly lyrical, these poems wrestle with the big questions—religion, immigration, climate change, politics, parenting, autism, and death—all on a deeply intimate level. Like an impressionist painter, she uses light to capture the immediacy of the present, the passage of time. Foust’s most remarkable gift is showing us “… the world as it is: gorgeous in its mortal wound.” —Ellen Bass

The poems in Rebecca Foust’s tremendous new collection, ONLY, attend to the fundamental act of giving shape to a life, while accounting for joy, grief, love and family. With narrative skill and lyric intensity, political alertness and imaginative flair, Foust is writing some of the most important poems of our day. Every poem in this book offers what Foust describes as moments of “seeing something new, and listening, really listening.” I’m convinced that we’ll be listening to these poems for a long time to come. —Peter Campion

SAMPLE

Only

O Love this happened or it did not.
In a room with green walls

my son was born. The cord was torn
too soon, so they cut off

his head to save his heart. He lived
for a long time.

For a long time there was no breath or cry.
When finally he spoke,

he spoke the wide, whorled leaves of corn.
He spoke the crickets

in clusters beneath the sheaves, he sang
the soil in. He sang the wind

in the dune and hush of ebb tide. Some say
he died. Some say he died.

REVIEW COMMENTS:

Publishers Weekly (starred review), https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781954245297

“The meditative and melodious second collection from Foust (Paradise Drives) relishes in the daily discoveries that make life endlessly mysterious. “Prompt” begins with instructions from poet Stephen Dunn: “Write only what you absolutely do not know, not what you’re merely not sure of.” The poem continues, “Null. All. What’s after death or before./ Where my old dog is now, my mother,/ my father—not the ashes clumped/ in a box, but the mad licking/ and tail-beating and the gaze,/ dense with devotion, of iris-less eyes.” Foust is in conversation elsewhere too, as in “Dawn Piece” (after “Night Piece” by Stanley Kunitz), which beautifully asks: “Love,// believe it is only my mouth seeking the last marrow/ memory before night bleeds out// into the neap-tide drawn dawn, and let me sleep on…” The author has a gift for rhythmic imagery, such as in “Dream of the Rood”: “The town’s reason, gone. Stripper pit/strawberries/stripper pit/corn./ Coke-caked smokestacks, brick pink/ in morning sun,” or “spring still half on the spool.” These poems finely weave contrasting subjects, sensually recollecting earlier life while casting a hard, penetrating look at identity, politics, family, and the climate crisis. In these beautifully crafted and ecstatic pages, Foust celebrates the strength of memory and the interconnectedness of all people.” (Sept.)”