No Border Is Perennial

Poetry. "This is a collection of extraordinary range and depth, with acute sensitivity and insight throughout. Ruth Handel’s gardens are ’no site for sentiment,’ but they are sites of visitations—uncanny and unsettling arrivals of nocturnal creatures, ghosts of memory, and the figures (and figurations) of the visual arts. Delineated with the precision of botanical drawing and recounted with equanimity and humor, these poems respond to cycles of grief and growth, to the recurrence of beauty in a troubled world that leaves us ’puzzled by the late collapse / of amity.’ In these tapestried poems, description becomes both method and process, not a means to adornment or embellishment but to comprehension and solace: ’against confusion / a momentary stay.’" —B. K. Fischer