In this small collection of graceful, refreshingly candid poems, Liz Rhodebeck visits those places of the heart and of the senses that are far too frequently overlooked. Her backdrop: a carefully detailed, richly realized version of the American prairie—vast, fertile, occasionally lit with delightful and unexpected images of the sea.
Rhodebeck’s evocation of a sense of place is, in fact, accomplished memorably throughout, as when she refers to “the curve of the cheek / of the naked winter land”, and how, later, “. . .the yellowed grass lies in sodden, melted puddles / and the fetid sweetness / of manured fields fills the air”. And when the poet turns her focus to mourn the death of an older friend and mentor, I mourn along with her, feeling, as she does, “a void, a needle pain.” The book left me deeply moved by what I, too, learned in Kansas.
—Marilyn L. Taylor
Wisconsin Poet Laureate