Tell It Slant by Marcy Llamas Senese

Like the shielded children in Emily Dickinson’s poem, from which this luminous first collection takes its title, we readers bear witness to a great deal of fierce truth within its pages, but revealed to us gradually, as recommended by the Belle of Amherst.

There is an enigmatic radiance throughout, whether beneath the cool blueness of moonlight or under the warmth of summer sun, but always both sky and skin consistently reflect the troubled light of Senese’s intimate portraits of her roots, mysterious haunts from her past, and of parents brought back to life for us through retrospection and through dreams; indeed, ephemeral methods of recall that “just tremble beneath the surface— the rumbling of memory.”

In the end, Senese keeps her promise to us, to “try to soothe away your fear” … no doubt Ms. Dickinson would approve.

–Robt O’Sullivan, regional editor, San Diego Poetry Annual and host of the Poets INC (Inland North County) reading series through the Escondido Arts Partnership.

If poems were composed with the gentlest of breaths, the soft shifting of down, the whole heaviness and weariness of a sigh, then these would be those very poems. Marcy Llamas Senese gathers the wisps and delicate stuff of memory and attachment. The very feeling of summer and eternity, the speaker comes to know, is contracting under the weight of so much loss. Tell It Slant is a moving and heartbreaking collection, masterfully sorted and beautiful in its subtlety, in its ability to do precisely as its title demands.

–Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life.