Author Description

Can poetry save the world? asks the poet, and wisely, doesn’t try to convince anyone that it can, but instead invites a reader to follow her on a poetic journey against despair. The images here range from bracing to sensual, from delight to witness, always surprising, as in “How to Celebrate My Death,” with its command to “... paint me/with quotations from the wild sweetness of life.” These resonant poems speak of humility and awe, revealing a journey worth taking. —Catherine Anderson, author of My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty and Belonging(Wising Up Press, 2022) Maril Crabtree’s poems are meditations, familiar as prayer. And yet, they invite the reader on a journey where, with each recitation, one has the opportunity to discover something new. Indeed, her work is full of “Grace. The capacity to face the edge and make it feel like the middle.” —Annie Klier Newcomer, Flapper Press poetry editor, author ofComets, Relationships that Wander Maril Crabtree’s new book travels through a life of wisdom and humor, with poems aware of suffering and loss, but buoyed by hope and beauty. Maril’s meticulously crafted poems use formal, nonce and experimental forms to complement her wide-ranging subject matter. The book confronts the horrors of the world in measured, thoughtful poetry. She writes of sexism, environmental loss, and those suffering injustice, especially children. However, she balances her witness of these horrors with the means to sustain hope. As a monk advises his companion whose feet hurt from walking on rough cobblestones in the opening poem, “Pilgrimage,” “Focus on the foot/that is in the air, not the one on the ground.” The poems return to the sustaining joys of life, aging, the diurnal, the acts of love that make hope possible. —Marcia Hurlow, poet, professor, and editor