Where Space Bends

With layered attention to sound, image, rhythm, metaphor, Where Space Bends' carefully hewn poems bring alive the story of a woman who lives by herself in an enchanting, rural mountain hamlet. Bookended and woven throughout is the shadow of Lyme Disease.

The book invites us into her inner reflections, how she uncovers wonder in daily rituals. She yanks out creeper vines, overwinters roots in the basement just before the equinox, crisps sunflower seeds and shovels new snow, hoisting mounds onto frozen banks higher than her shoulders. She considers the patience of the hundred-year-old Victorian, and asks whether those that had owned it had loved it enough. Alone by choice through an uncharacteristically cold winter, she sees she is aging in the feathering whiteness of her hair.

The book unfolds into discoveries of how Lyme Disease may have developed into something so virulent and what could be resulting ramifications. Realizations about other worlds that exist within us lead the reader into the excited joy of the Lyme Disease spirochetes, into their ecstasy, how they revel in our tissues. This happens as the woman explores natural forms of healing in her conversations with the daunting heat of the sauna, her prayers to the poison of wormwood.

Interspersed with existential depression, a desire for escape from paralyzing snows, temperatures hovering near zero for weeks, she questions the complicated surfaces of difficult emotions as if they were an alternate kind of being.

In her yearning to woo the universe, she searches for transformation in the smallest things. In the bagfuls of grimy pennies a roommate has left, in the pale masks of new born raccoons, in the razor spikes and velvet pockets of chestnut hulls. She marvels at mayflies who live for just one day, their mouths with no moving parts, their only reason for existence to reproduce. She bravely crosses out the legal birth name and pencils her beloved friend's vital name into the soft wood, as the conveyer belt rolls the coffin into the crematory furnace. There is even mindfulness, devotion to detail and poetic justice within her loss.

With an overriding sensitivity, she understands her strange reality is based on a compendium of possibilities of thought, minute bodily sensations and swirling energies that take place for her simultaneously. Even in simple times.

This is a book about a searcher, even in the face of changing illnesses, a believer in the gift of meaning, who is always hopeful for a way through. Vibrant in the mist and wind of mountain seasons, she is always aware that she is at a crossroads.