In these last prayerful poems, the poet visits loss, death, and transitional states. Full of longing, connections, and intergenerational knowledge, Valentine continues the mystical journey that has carried her through a lifetime devoted to poetry.
Valentine writes about everything — love, death, sex, the roiling political situations of the last half-century — with simultaneous candor and mystery ... Valentine's poems draw our attention to the words beneath the words, what's said between them, in all the white space surrounding the poems ... Poems [that] are profoundly alive.
Wound and balm at once—these small, careful poems offer a poetics of boundlessness ... They are not the poems of remembering or retelling. They are not poems of intention, and they refuse to explain. They are the dream process for keeps, immune to the idea of forgetting as a failure of mind.
