She offers no easy answers to how we might heal in a dangerous world when even our closest relationships might betray us. My mother never enters at the right/ time, even in my dreams, she confides. Yet she writes that all of us can find back doors/ into the body after illness, loss and the hauntings of memory.
In post-pandemic America, this is the book I needed to read. Weaver, an herbalist, knows we and the earth can heal together. Find channels that soothe. ...Send anxiety into the earth. One of these channels is poetry.
The title of the collection comes from the final line of the poem "I've Lived Through One War." She rallies us with the lines: We must ask/ new questions, find unconventional answers...It's time/for massive change.../ Our planet, slow now with clear skies.
-Joanne M. Clarkson, author of Hospice House
There's something going on here. She's done explaining. Done justifying. Done worrying well. She's wailing. Grieving. Believing. Bringing her healing
powers. Her nurturing. Her whole wise woman self. Looking unflinchingly at this life. After plagues and pandemics. After war. After global ecological
ruin. After injustices. After loss after loss. There's a surge of possibilities: Survival. Gratitude. Incantations. Touch. And most of all-hope.
-John Burgess, author of Punk Poems