With vivid imagery and startling intimacy, Alinda Wasner's poems delve into the many experiences of love, not neglecting the edge of sorrow inescapable in our lives. And I love the line: "I feel an angel in my heart...."
-John Gallagher, journalist, The Detroit Free Press, author of Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity and The Englishman and Detroit: A British Entrepreneur Helps Restore a City's Confidence
The poems in Alinda Wasner's newest collection, The Day Sky Is Also Filled with Stars: Love Poems for My Beloveds-refract the joys and connectedness of love through myriad "prisms of desire." Saturated with gorgeous imagery from the natural world, while ever aware that there may be "an undercurrent of darkness on the brightest day," these unabashed poems celebrate, caress, forgive, and invigorate. Through love's "first lick of heat lightning up the spine" to the "daily lunacy" of family life and the magical bonds between grandparent and grandchild, Wasner's exuberance and purity of spirit are unwavering. I especially love her moments of hilarity and the tenderness with which she weaves the "unending arc of happiness" we all long for.
-Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, Founding Director, InsideOut Literary Arts Project; Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow; Winner 2010 Pablo Neruda Prize in Poetry; Author Escape Artist (2003 John Ciardi Prize); One Less River (Top 2019 Kirkus Reviews Indie Poetry Title)
Alinda Wasner's superb new collection of love poems, The Day Sky Is Also Filled With Stars, will catch your "heart in the updraft!" Filled with sensitivity, hope, and passion, her themes and imagery create a deeply felt poetry that enlightens, enriches, and encircles us all, even in moments of loss and longing and pain. Her exquisite prose poem "Sonogram Song, the Aria," captures a "World so dazzling and so full of splendor!" It's just what the doctor ordered for these post-pandemic times. With words that lift off the page in a beautiful mist of truth and understanding, this popular, acclaimed, and widely published Detroit poet demonstrates throughout that life may have many twists and turns, ups and downs, but in the end, "All We Need Is Love."
-M. L. Liebler, Michigan Poet Laureate, author of I Want to Be Once; Editor of the poetry anthology RESPECT: Poets on Detroit Music
