The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouth Jars

This unique collection/anthology uncannily puts its finger on the pulse of our pandemic concerns of loneliness and isolation and our longing for community and conversation. Despite the distinctive voices of the three women, these poems weave into a whole, or perhaps a better metaphor is a patchwork quilt, sewn by many hands, while colored threads of gossip and conversation, observation and confession, tales of love and violence, are pulled through with a sharp, squinting needle. While the paths of these three women, three friends, travel to new places, there are common elements of Southern gothic, humor, observations on aging and love, longing and sense of place, and the poems speak to each other as well as to the reader. The poets have shared poems over a period of time, inspiring and riffing off one another, editing one another's work, so that there is something both ancient and choral and contemporary and subversively collaborative about this project, especially in a literary scene obsessed with self-promotion, exposure, and individual celebrity. -A. E. Stallings Part of how we remember poets is how poets remember each other. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bishop and Lowell, Levertov and Duncan and Rich: these friendships survive in letters and poems that reveal much about how these poets influenced each other's work. But rarely do we have a single book written, edited, and imagined collaboratively by three poet-friends who reflect upon many of the same concerns and, in doing so, inspire in each other new avenues of thought. Here are poems about aging parents and ex-lovers, memory and belief, partnership, ambition, art and marriage. These poems together become a profound conversation that evolves between friends. It's a generous, empathetic, and loving collection that is as much an ode to the life-giving powers of friendship as of poetry itself. -Paisley Rekdall These harmonically blended voices project a feminine perspective from spaces made "undomestic" by loss, violence, and disaster. Yet, in these poems you will also find rich and beautiful attention to the world-Narcissus blooms, abdomen scars, alighting birds, the smoke of cigars, the cars of heroic strangers-as well as to lovers, friends, and family made strange via the labyrinth of accumulated memory. Indeed, the weight of time gives these poems heft. Their speakers traverse the traumatic and quotidian with insight that is only drawn from experience, transformed into poetry through the authors' prismatic imagination. Reading this collection, one begins to believe that the mundane can become new again: "as if the world / is some ancient coin / and you're scraping / off the caked-on mud / to discover the luster." -Danielle Deulen