Melancholy, exuberance, nostalgia, fulfillment, contentment, longing—Sarah Russell hits all the spots, and there isn’t one poem where a woman won’t be able to identify in some way. She’s singing all our songs, putting into magical words things we felt so often but never knew how to tell. This book has deep sadness matched by laughter, gentleness, love and a sense of adventure. It was a privilege being there with her, living what she remembers, identifying with every line. “‘I want to live,’ she said, / and this time I knew / she didn’t mean forever.” Indeed—who hasn’t been there. I LOST SUMMER SOMEWHERE is a book of poetry you will find difficult to put down. A rare gift, a gentle journey from life’s morning into the evening, and deeply moving.

Rose Mary Boehm, author of Tangents, From the Ruhr to Somewhere Near Dresden, and Peru Blues

Available from Kelsay Books or Amazon

 

Emergence features poems of celebration and gratitude for a life well-lived, focusing on the simple gifts of everyday. The speaker here is emerging, like the dragonflies in her pond, into her fullest maturity. Like her old, beloved purse, she cherishes her self, her life “still / carrying its weight, stitching / still strong.” A memory at the beauty salon evokes a long-ago lover; an art project with a grandchild has “paper hearts flying / everywhere.” Humor flavors many of these poems. To her husband she offers “a body past first frost, a mind slightly ajar.” Elsewhere, she asks, “Shall I Compare Our Marriage to a Circus?” There is appreciation and acceptance, as in “Harbored,” about a moored sloop. “Old boats prefer the gentle swells near shore, I think, clouds flirting with the moon, wisps of wind riffling the water.”

Mary Rohrer-Dann, author of Accidents of Being: Poems from a Philadelphia Neighborhood

Emergence is available at Amazon and through Kelsey Books.

Today and Other Seasons moves through landscape and memory. With a startling economy of language, Sarah Russell writes of coyotes “silent as smoke,” and an Amish market’s “chubby garlic bulbs, / currants round as BBs, bunioned ginger toes.” In Russell’s poem about fishing with her grandfather, the scuff and burble of people and water run through the language: “The night before, I dug for worms, stored / them in a soup can by the wicker creel / that smelled of grass and brook trout.” Sarah writes not only with stillness and precision but with understated humor, describing an old wringer washer as a “dowager / on a dance floor” and the courtship of finches as “a warbled / discussion of real estate and love.” There is so much to savor in this fine small collection.

Sarah Carleton, author of Notes from the Girl Cave

Available from Kelsay Books or Amazon.

In The Ballerina Swan Lake Mobile Homes Country Club Motel, Wanda, a single woman in her early fifties, is the owner of the motel at the base of a water-starved mountain. She’s hardened by circumstance, morally honest, outspoken, and stuck in her life. When she rescues a stray pit bull, and then a defiant teenage girl, Wanda’s life will never be the same.

You can read the first chapter or 2 of Ballerina Swan Lake Mobile Homes Country Club Motel if you open Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature.