The Orchard Street Press is pleased to announce the release of Leftover Prayers, the insightful new poetry collection from Susan Squellati Florence of Ojai, California, exploring change and loss in life and the presence of nature to provide beauty, solace, and renewal.
Lisken Van Pelt Dus, author of What We Are Made Of, says of these poems: “Leftover Prayers are soulful lessons of letting loose/prayers of (…) self.’ As they drift between the worlds of the living and the dead, both painful and precious…In rich, sensory language, Florence ‘sets out in search of God,’ and finds instead openings to herself that are loosed from her observations. Turtles, feathers, music, dreams, and borrowed prayers become conduits for ‘what lingers long in (her).’ As we explore the elusive territory between loss and life with these poems, they allow us to find, if not always joy, then at least a certain redemptive beauty, in ‘just being/in the present/with each other.’”
Author of The Future Wears Camouflage, Kate Kingston notes: “In these poems, Susan Florence sifts through time and place—Teotitlan, Languedoc, Ojai, Kauai, Bali—pulling up fragments of prayers, restoring their luster, their wholeness, Through language rooted in everyday chaos, she hones images that border on the celestial…Her poems insist on exploring the intricacies of what it is to be female in shifting cultures often using nature as a metaphor as in this tribute to her sister—‘peach clouds parade sky/flat bottomed puffs let loose of each other/shape shift into animals and angel wings.’ Her words feel like sun on our shoulders after a spring downpour, as if we too are ‘called to sit/under these bare branches/and like the wisteria/let the sky in.’”
Leftover Prayers is available for $14 (online or via the mail) from:
The Orchard Street Press
P.O. Box 280
Gates Mills, Ohio 44040
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Orchpress.com (web)
330-264-7733