Carolyn Clark gets better with each book, each poem. Where else could we get woodlands, strawberries, free range blue eggs, in a world populated by Artemis, Eurydice, Apollo, and horses. To create the beauty and mystery of classic myths within the natural world is to be inside and outside of the imagination, a rare read. Cobwebs, woodchucks, compost, Covid, stars—poems from the pandemic that make us heal. Clark says, “My heart glows with affection.” So do ours, your readers.
—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland Poet Laureate

This book’s title points two ways: literal and metaphoric. In her poems, Carolyn Clark pictures the first and seeks the second. A free spirit with wordplay, rhyme, and cognates across the European language spectrum, she addresses her trees as “rusting red/organ donors/doing their job/better than me” and pauses during a pandemic to “feel no guilt/in rejoicing in nature.” Clark’s work celebrates marriage’s sick days and valentines, a ranch’s new blue eggs and hand tools and dearly aging mares—aware that we are “just one stop away from extinction,” yet affirming hope as a space to live in.
—Mary Gilliland, author of The Devil’s Fools