With a simple elegance yet passionate attention to nature, to the legacies of the land and people around her, Eppstein renders both the ant and the redwood unforgettable, and reminds us to stay awake, to praise each living, breathing being.
DORIANNE LAUX
author of Facts About the Moon,
Smoke, and What We Carry
"In 'Manaia' Maureen Eppstein writes of a stranger who gives her "a carved/ and polished disk of bone...tail coiled like a fern frond unfolding...or a lizard, keeper of life and death." Rogue Wave at Glass Beach is much like this amulet, the poet's gift to us. As Maureen Eppstein says, "Nothing between us but this shared glimpse"-what could be a better definition of poetry?"
ELLEN BASS
author of The Human Line and Mules of Love
Maureen Eppstein's Rogue Wave at Glass Beach is marked by the exilic errantry of a writer whose keen perception continually reveals the wondrous in the familiar. With roving eye and ear, her speakers negotiate the alien terrain of their own pasts, their bodies, and of our beautiful and strife-torn world. Through stunning images and sure music, these moving and admirably-crafted poems impress themselves upon us like the lineaments of place, reminding us that language is "the way we learn to belong."
JOSHUA MCKINNEY
author of The Novice Mourner and Saunter
Embarking on this journey with Eppstein, what was immediately apparent is the longstanding dedication to her craft, the caring for her words, her patience. She is a teller of histories, a weaver, of past and present, holding always in her weft a deep appreciation for those cultures who lived close to the land, close to the sea-and the plight in which they, all of us, find ourselves: landed now on these tamed shores of modern life. She touches-as every poet must-the mysteries of loss, of disappointment, of death. Her compassion for life is evident throughout, her feeling for the predicament of us all. And so she performs the poet's work: giving form in words to those feelings we sometimes cannot speak.
MICHELE KETTERER
Mendocino Arts Magazine
