SAINTS AND OTHER STRANGERS by Bonnie Amesquita

Saints and Other Strangers is a quiet book.  It’s that friend who always seems happiest in the background, observing.  The one who surprises you with her extraordinary insights, her sympathies, her just-right way of expressing something you’ve sensed but hadn’t realized you’d felt until that moment.  It’s also a book to let us know that, though “none of us is safe,” little islands of rest and safety exist.  Religion may be one such refuge, but Amesquita, though hopeful, questions much.  Love, however, is for sure.  Love is ultimately what remains “When Stars Collide.”

–Susan Azar Porterfield is the author of Dirt, Root, Silk, winner of the Cider Press Review Editor’s Prize for Poetry.

“Don’t let her fool you – Bonnie Amesquita is a Cassidy by birth, and what I admire most about these poems  is the way they capture the peculiar wonders, wounds, and wants of growing up  Irish-Catholic, working class, when women were first being told they might think about going to college.  Courage and self-doubt collide with each other here.  You’ll find cruelty and tenderness, lit up by moments of holy mystery, all throughout Bonnie’s work.  These poems are honest, blunt, flirtatious. and somehow disarming  – there’s not one precious line in the book.”

–Reverend Joe Gastiger, author of Loose Talk and If You So Desire

Who and what is this “I” we keep hearing so much about?  In Bonnie Amesquita’s Saints and Other Strangers, she courageously explores her “I” and discovers: “My red and wrinkled face / my wild hair / tell me / I am nova / blistered, exploded / made of worlds / living and dead.”  This is why we need poetry.  This is why we need Saints and Other Strangers.

–John Bradley, author of Erotica Atomica