SWEET MERCIES by Dianne Stepp

In Sweet Mercies, Dianne Stepp takes us to the verge: we hover with her at the shimmering intersection of vividly experienced life and the weight of past injury, loss, and grief that informs the “sweet mercies” of each day.  We overhear those who hold us in the palms of their hands, who murmur in conversation from a snow-covered graveyard, from the fields of Vicksburg, from the corner café.  Acutely tuned to the savors of apricots, the anglers’ “gash of gills laid in a row,” Stepp brings to light our great good luck to witness both the hummingbird’s “dab and blur” and the ceremonial spill of family ashes into rivers’ white swirl. Enter these vivid pages as on a journey, where voices, past and present, enter our lives newly made aware, newly made grateful.

–Judith H. Montgomery, Author of Passion, Red Jess, and Pulse & Constellation

In Sweet Mercies, Dianne Stepp weaves the holy fiber of personal love — and loss — hand over hand with her felt connection to peoples across the world, and hand over hand again with the seed’s gift of regeneration. The “figs/on my tree oozing/sugar” with “in Palestine the Israelis/…bulldozing fig orchards/again.” The “women of Theresienstadt” dreaming of “yeast and goosefat/…and the small mouths of berries,” with her search for the “tall, thin, pale” loved one and the “shape of his death” in a “night that never truly/falls.” An astonishing collection. A gift to us all.

–Frances Payne Adler, Poet, professor emerita, and founder of the Creative Writing and Social Action Program, California State University Monterey Bay. Co-creator of Dare I Call You Cousin, an exhibition about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

With their deeply sonic rhythms and melodies, their celebration of the senses, Dianne Stepp’s poems thread the realities of grief, loneliness, war and violence, with the healing mercies of daily life, opening for the reader a terrain of deep feeling and gratitude.

–Mary Holscher, PhD, Founder and retreat leader of Ourselves Growing Older