They Say by Linda Warren

In They Say, Linda Warren does not flatten the emotional barb, but hooks the reader through her words. Her poetry is not only fly fishing for “the graceful shapes of silver trout”, but lands the reader hard and fast. Her lines connect the natural world to past and present circumstances, catch and release not only salmon and trout, but also anger, regret, and joy. Warren’s language reveals a deep understanding of the arts of poetry, fly fishing, and living in this world. The book itself is, like the first trout of April, “…not a miracle / but oh, sweet universe, it’s close enough.”

–Susan Roney O’Brien, winner of the Kingsman Poetry Prize and author of Thira

There’s a voice here, mercurial, alive, filled with a wisdom running steady and true. If you seek her in these poems, you may find Thoreau’s “Gone Fishing” sign posted on her door, but she’s fishing for something else, some evanescent beauty and whatever’s left in this old world that still just might be true. She’s looking for that perfect place to stand with all this swirling, mysterious, elusive, and yet ever-present life roaring by, like some river, as she says, that “ravels” all around us. She wants to hold this hard-won place where she can see clearly, and reel in the light. She is searching for you.

–John Hodgen, winner of the AWP Prize in Poetry

Linda Warren knows how to cast a line. With the flick of a wrist, she lays it out, fresh and inviting, upon the page.  While many of her poems are about fly fishing, they only begin there. Like a true poet, she sees-observes connections between casting for a trout and…, well, other matters in her life, in lives. Her personal effort never bars us from observing too, with a pleasurable invitation to see more, for enrichment. Her mastery of craft is apparent in the variety of distinct poems she creates: a long-line meditation; curt, anxious lines; prose-verse; lyrical evocations; ingenious rhymes; painful admissions.  Far from being left out, we are encouraged to see more, to be blessed by the ghosts out there, by the light, the grace of absorption in the natural which leads us to, perhaps, a miracle.

–Eugene McCarthy, professor Emeritus of Holy Cross College and author of Sound Ideas