Quilt Life: Poems, Paperback

Many seasons have handled the life of this poet, and her words are patched with grief and love, buckets of light and longing. In Quilt Life, Cindy Bosley's images have great depth because she refuses to shy away from hard truths. A seer of the natural world, she knows the heart's small ship must be rebuilt and not boxed for display. Her poems are "not the easy kind of talk." No. They show us the dark fluids boiling in what must never be forgotten, the human fragility of trying to remain whole. Jeanne Bryner

The poems in Cindy Bosley's Quilt Life are constructed from the fabric of woman--body and soul and heart. Sensual and lush, the language ranges from the everyday--"I fell in love with Father Paul at Sunday mass when I was nine" to the surreal--"My breasts are fat, lipsticked ladies from / the opera: year after year they sing each other//their most famous arias." Quilt Life takes you into a dry, dusty Middle America and verdant tropics in poems of mystery and longing, desertion and death, poverty and grief. But these are also poems of fortitude, resilience, courage, and faith in love and the things that matter. Diane K. Martin