Things That Were Only Briefly the Truth by Lara Adams Gaydos

Lara Adams Gaydos grew up in central and northern New Jersey. After graduating from Rutgers University  in 1994, she moved west, eventually settling in Colorado Springs, Colorado where she met a group of local poets who encouraged her to begin writing. She joined Poetry West and attended workshops, retreats and readings in the area for many years. In 2006 she moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania where she had the opportunity to meet and work with a talented community of poets led by Dr. Christopher Bursk. She attended Professor Bursk’s master poetry workshop at Bucks County Community College for many years. After placing as a runner-up three times, she was named the the Bucks County Poet Laureate in 2012.  In the summer of 2014, Lara returned to the Colorado Springs area where she reconnected with Poetry West and the local Pikes Peak area poetry community. She now lives in Monument, Colorado with her husband, two daughters, and their rag tag collection of rescued pets, where she continues to write and connect with local poets.  Lara is the author of These Domestic Incidences (2018) and Things That Were Only Briefly the Truth (2014), both published by Finishing Line Press. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including: Poems from the Baca Grande, U.S. 1 Worksheets, Slant, A Journal of Poetry, and the Schuylkill Valley Journal. Her work was recently featured and performed in the 2019 Women’s Theater Festival at the Millibo Arts Theater in Colorado Springs.

PRAISE:

Here is a book full of beautiful things – fountains, an antique copy of “Paradise Lost,” tiger lilies, geraniums, Van Gogh’s wheat fields, dragonflies, the Big Dipper– but notice the title, “Things That Were Only Briefly the Truth.” Lara Adams Gaydos is a poet that understands impermanence, and the menace found in the smallest of events, a child’s loose tooth, or in the largest, North Korea’s nuclear testing. “My dryer could catch fire any moment,” Gaydos writes in the ironically titled “Good Housekeeping.” But though schooled by loss from an early age and recognizing that “some shadows are best left alone,” Gaydos returns us again and again to the transcendent, the capacity to expect magic from this world: “My daughters stretch themselves out/across the shadowy lawn, certain/that this time when they reach/for the ladle/it will dip just enough/ and they’ll drink ice cold milk/straight from the sky.” Here is a poet who satisfies an old and sacred thirst in us.

–Christopher Bursk, author of “The Improbable Swervings of Atoms”

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]