Sycamore

Praise for Sycamore "It's hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan's mind is endless with depth and truth--her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves--we are each other too, living and remembering within each other's shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition."--Brenda Shaughnessy "Kathy Fagan's poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don't miss this beautiful, knowing book."--Barbara Ras "Kathy Fagan's poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may 'dress defensively'; however, 'all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.' Fagan's sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: 'Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.' Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years."--Randall Mann