Orange Persephone by Margaret Lee

“Margaret Lee’s Orange Persephone is a fusion of woeful utterance and gripping expression; intensely felt, attentive, and self-questioning in its grief.”

–Catherine Strisik, author of Insectum Gravitis

“I took my grief to the sea,” Margaret Lee tells us in Orange Persephone, “Grey grief, a thousand deaths… and the waves pounded against the cliff… and the waves crashed against the black basalt.” Lee’s passionate yet masterfully restrained expression of the divine feminine –– mother, daughter –– within the music of embodiment and by way of a contemporary woman’s experience of devotion and loss, is utterly transporting: “The night silence, its acid/edge, never again quiet.”

–Sawnie Morris, author of Her, Infinite

Margaret Lee has a gift for melding inner and outer worlds with sensibility and sensitivity. Her daughter, “Orange Persephone,” is an “unabashed/brave bloom,” yet tragedy strikes the daughter’s and, hence, the mother’s life. Lee enters that pain with grace and abandon, taking us on a journey to survey the constellations and the depths of the ocean, carried by the waves. In “Unraveled,” the poet cries out, “I am a garment soon to be cut from the loom.” Yet it is the beauty of the poet’s words and the precious silence between words that lingers, reminding us that beauty exists in even the barest moments of our lives.

–Caroline Cottam, author of Asylum