About the Book
The intimate and also highly generalizable poems in Source Notes: Seventh Decade revolve around two core questions: "If everything we said to define ourselves/was preceded by Just like everyone or/ Like most of us, what would shift/in the life-long construction project/we call our self?" and "Who says age can't be luxurious, /astonishing, sui generis?" The poems in the collection move from public events to highly personal ones, both past and present, and explore creativity, the sweetness of age, the joys of marriage, early trauma, motherhood, family relationships, the surprising resonances of travel and the mysteries of savoring in place. Within and between poems patterns appear, disappear, transform, new stories, without noticing come into being, teaching us again and again "we are never too old for rebirth, the hold of the miraculous." Intriguing photographs amplify the text.
About the Author :
Heather Tosteson is the author of two earlier poetry collections, The Sanctity of the Moment: Poems from Four Decades and Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English, as well as several works of fiction and non-fiction. She is the recipient of fellowships in poetry, fiction, and photography from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Hambidge Center for the Arts as well as a Discovery/The Nation poetry prize. A co-founder of Wising Up Press, she has co-edited and illustrated sixteen Wising Up Anthologies. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and PhD in English and Creative Writing from Ohio University.
Review :
Heather Tosteson's Source Notes: Seventh Decade is a brave, unvarnished reassessment of the poet's life, an unsentimental reckoning that celebrates awe, wonder, and gratitude, while accepting and confronting remorse, betrayal, and loss. . . . In lyrical poems that beguile with their music, and stun with their candor, Heather Tosteson invites us to share "the ripe wild fruit of eternity."
-Gary Young, author of That's What I Thought: Poems and New and Selected Poems
In her newest collection of poetry, Heather Tosteson once again delivers an exquisitely crafted vision of existence that is simultaneously broad and intimate, beautiful and fraught, manageable (through tremendous effort) and wild. Her poems do not lie.
-Kat Meads, author of Dear DeeDee
Poem by poem, as I savored Source Notes: Seventh Decade, I grew increasingly inspired. It's wonderful for a young poet to be bold and brave, but it's an even more miraculous feat for an artist entering her 70's.
-Lowell Jaeger, Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019, author of Earth-blood & Star-shine
In Source Notes, there is an abundance of wisdom, also an abundance of pain-abuse, mental illness, misunderstandings-interwoven into luminous poems in which tree frogs and quetzals are as likely to show up as estranged relatives yearning for reconciliation.
-Kathleen Housley, author of Firmament, Epiphanies
The creativity, bravery, and wisdom of Tosteson's narrator are hard-earned, genuine, and ever-evolving. She reassures the reader, "We are never too old for rebirth"-and we believe her.
-Janice Eidus, author of The Last Jewish Virgin and The War of the Rosens
In Source Notes: Seventh Decade, Heather Tosteson maps the inner lives of women in a way that is both mystical and deeply intellectual, keeping alive poetry's big questions of transcendence, revelation, awe, and grounded presence in the ordinary. What a large and compassionate gift to the reader, a gift from a life given to inner investigation of what it means to be a human being anchored within the tangible things of the world. As the poet says, Trust the emptiness within/ and the rain sifting gently/ through palm, jacaranda and mimosa.
-Mary Kay Rummel, author of Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone, poet laureate emerita of Ventura County, CA
"I just want to make meaning of my life," writes Heather Tosteson. She does that with contemplative care in all the biographical poems in Source Notes: Seventh Decade. A life lived vividly shape-shifts over time, if we are to grow. With growth comes reckonings, evolving intimacies, reconciliations, acceptance, even redemption. I felt more grounded in my own relationship with ageing as I read these poems by a kindred spirit.
-Felicia Mitchell, author of Waltzing with Horses
Source Notes: Seventh Decade is an amazing collection. Tosteson's well-crafted poems cover a broad territory with candor and depth. Her remarkable photographs, so powerful in their simplicity, contribute additional levels of meaning as well, revealing the unexpected, the 'just-out-of sight, ' or what often goes unseen.
-Diana Anhalt, author of Walking Backward
