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by Joyce Meyers (Author)
Winner, 2024 Blue Light Poetry Prize
The poems in Stray Moments are incredibly deep in their understanding of the world and our place in it. These poems do not stray; they move like light through changes in the seasons and the loves and losses of all living things. In language and insight so precise that we grow dizzy on the "cusp of ripeness and decay," Meyers shows how, as the December sun "hangs low as if still leashed to night," so do we hold on; how robins in February can make a heart "soar;" how it is possible to "hear the light singing/before the sun's rim/edges over the ridge;" and that always, "Somewhere between/here and the horizon sharks circle." These wonderful poems lead us to see how we might apprehend our own worlds, seen and unseen, and feel our "heart a caged bird/set free."
-- Patricia Lee Lewis, award-winning poet, author of A Kind of Yellow and High Lonesome.
Stray Moments starts with an invitation to listen, and we can't help but respond and say, "Yes, I see." From there, Meyers takes us on a journey that draws on the natural world, where everything witnessed is life "on the cusp of joy and despair." Images of a "hatchling," "wet wings," "silhouetted gulls," "astral dust," and "ghosts of butterflies," are married to ordinary rituals like "grains of rice tossed at a wedding;" a grandson building sandcastles; sectioning a grapefruit or savoring an ice cream cone; or coins at the Trevi fountain. These poems, painted with lines "streaking cobalt water," "fish flash[ing] silver," a "sky pearl-gray," and water lilies "sprouting rose and alabaster," welcome us into our own stray moments where we might reflect on "how parallel lines can meet, / a space between/mathematics and magic," how the "apple blossom knows/the hour to open, the acorn/knows when to fall," and "how to compose a coda/ worthy of it all?" Each poem in Stray Moments cascades into the next and lingers long after you've turned the final page.
---Lisa DeVuono, 2024 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA, and author of This Time Roots, Next Time Wings
Joyce
Winner, 2024 Blue Light Poetry PrizeThe poems in Stray Moments are incredibly deep in their understanding of the world and our place in it. These poems do not stray; they move like light through changes in the seasons and the loves and losses of all living things. In language and insight so precise that we grow dizzy on the "cusp of ripeness and decay," Meyers shows how, as the December sun "hangs low as if still leashed to night," so do we hold on; how robins in February can make a heart "soar;" how it is possible to "hear the light singing/before the sun's rim/edges over the ridge;" and that always, "Somewhere between/he
