Tag: books

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“Sophia Falco is a born learner and seeker, as her very name suggests, questing after the wisdom of a psychic-spiritual order that will transform herself lastingly. The title of her award-winning new book, If My Hands Were Birds: A Poem, suggests this utter yearning for flight, for release into becoming little birds lost, doves or falcons in flight across heaven and earth. This long quasi-narrative poem holds these felt tensions of embodiment as well as a Buddhist-like release from the prison-house (or bird cage) of flesh-meat into some airy creature of metamorphosis via sustained expression and a tender openness to change and future love. Poetry grounds and sustains these tensions, storms, and inner flux of mind and affect into achieved diary-like form, an ethos of creative activism and compassion, all elegantly and brilliantly collated daily as original poetry as in a state of renewed innocence, healing, and rebirth: for “my life was on the line” once again in these life-saving lines of poetry or like “a basketball in flight” as one last perfect shot.”

—Rob Wilson is a poet-scholar who teaches in the Literature Department at UC Santa Cruz & author of When the Nikita Moon Rose as well as Be Always Converting, Be Always Converted: An American Poetics.

Sophia Falco wields her poetry as lamp and lance against the darkness that surrounds us all — claiming her place proudly within the ranks of poets past whose private lifelong struggles with mental illness, sexuality, and silence she both echoes and embodies (from Emily Dickinson to Allen Ginsberg to Mary Oliver). In doing so she achieves brief flights and flashes of an almost zen-like insight: graceful as the arc of a basketball at the buzzer; gentle as the rustle of hands over paper. Reaching “outwards instead of inwards” for “a way out of this / mind maze.” And finding it here within these pages.

—Dr. Scott Lankford, Professor of English (emeritus), Foothill College Stanford GEN Global Educators Networkand honors–memory as a landscape where endless discovery beckons, where sanctuary may be found.

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If a book can be a song, the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of this memoir-in-fragments, Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou, the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham’s past—his father, his lost wife, his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love, urging us all home.

Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Voice Lessons and I Could Name God in Twelve Ways

In Gone the Sun, Peckham writes about his loving, sometimes fraught history with Manitou, a summer camp he and his father worked at for many years. As his father declines into dementia the middle-aged Peckham—still working summers at the camp between semesters as a college professor—muses upon time, upon loss, and the various selves we inhabit as we age. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, but heartbreaking in the most resonant, emotionally intelligent, and illuminating way possible.

Sue William Silverman, author, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul

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