back cover blurbs...

Blessed with an artist's precision, Lynda Calabrese offers us a series of dazzling meditations on her own lovingly observed world. We travel from Cochella Valley to Florida Route 4, from Rockaway Beach to the Museum of Modern Art, from Camp Cayuga to the Wash N' Fold. In poems of great richness and variety, wit and irony, Calabrese writes of long good-byes and homesickness, of joy and fulfillment. She writes of what it is to be a child, what it is to be a woman. She writes to "celebrate/ what will never dry or be crushed. " We read her poems as though they were a narrative: "It is the light in the presence/ of such darkness that draws us in."

Judy Goldman author of The Slow Way Back, Wanting to Know the End,
and Holding Back Winter

 

In "The Sum Of Our Breath", Lynda Calabrese opens up and shares a treasure chest of familial vignettes with slicing wit and frankness. We hear her voice as sister, daughter, wife, but most profoundly as Jewish-American mommy angst. This collection is a poetic gem for anyone with blood-ties to humanity.

M. Scott Douglass Publisher/Editor Main Street Rag

 

Every day is a poem for Lynda Calabrese.

Kevin Bezner author of Particularities, Wherever, The Tools of Ignorance,
and The Wilderness of Vision: On the Poetry of John Haines with Kevin Bezner

 

The act of reading these poems must be similar to what it's like to be in a dark room watching a photograph come to life. There's the expectancy and the surprise when light hits! The poems shine like glinting silver - even with the mundane moments as when Calabrese, washing clothes at a laundromat, transforms herself into "flamenco" and dances towards her husband's gaze, feeling suddenly "the hum of [ their] billowed days." These, after all, are love poems - poems that embrace joy, vulnerability, even the losses she tries to "retouch" with words. The poems are compelling celebrations of the privilege of being alive on this planet.

Irene Blair Honeycutt , founding director CPCC Annual Literary Festival
and author of It Comes As a Dark Surprise and forthcoming in Spring 2002 Waiting for the Trout to Speak