her presiding spirit, Persephone, Rivara brings eloquent life to that dead zone, auguring eventual escape, with a musician’s schooled and pitch-perfect ear, a sensual feel and exact eye for nature, language honed to the finest edge: “lakes’s raw lace-edge, cuttooth moon, loons/knife beneath foam: spring, unsheathing." ~ Eleanor Wilner The poems in Sara Quinn Rivara’s Lake Effect enact a high-stakes “beautiful mess” of a life. The Michigan she conjures is a site of myth renewed by the deeply-witnessed world, where logs are “blistered with frogs” and “the grasses undo from the sky’s blue loom.” Her lines are Whitman-wide, her ferocity Plathian in the dizzying blade of its diction: “Your body…befuddles the thrush, baffles the moon. Is a sugar-tit of reassurance.” The lush beauty and opulent music of Rivara’s lines serves the subversive intent of all great poetry—to recoup one’s life from the forces of erasure, so that “what I hold in my hands I own.” ~ Diane Seuss, author of Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry

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