Lorraine Jeffery

"Here, I search for agates' ocher transparency / glittering among broken shells / and pewter pebbles, / when I walk wind-blasted red rocks home" the speaker of the poems in Saltwater Soul lives in the liminal space between homes, between a beloved watery Pacific coast and an abrasive dry Great Basin west. The poems in this collection startle and dazzle, weaving family stories, landscapes, small resistances and wide-open immersions with great formal variety and a wealth of visual particulars. Of an osprey: "A shiny black gargoyle, of parts / and angles, as if he were built / from an Erector set." These are poems to help a reader navigate a beautiful burning world-tactile, dream, talismanic.-Lisa Bickmore, Poet Laureate of Utah

Tethers is a book of elegy and celebration, one that documents this rich and sometimes heart-breaking opposition via a variety of formal means: free verse, rhymed quatrains, sonnets, even a villanelle. Perhaps most enticingly, she backdrops struggles with plenty of detail, including quilts and cliffs and "an orchestra of kites," mussels and smoked cod, "prickly cukes" and "beleaguered bees." And though she documents with great facility, she is quick to remind us that roses come "complete with thorns, still clinging to their frosted stems." In short, she wades into trouble, including not only quotidian disappointments but aging, isolation, even familial dementia. How appropriate her title, Tethers. Over and over, Jeffery shows us how we're connected to this world and to past and future generations (at least five by my count), with Jeffery right smack dab in the middle, learning from the past, leaning hard and hopeful into the future. -Lance Larsen (Utah Poet Laureate, 2012-17)