The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels by Kate Cumiskey

Like a painter whose landscapes always have human figures in them, these poems present family, friends, and lost loved ones in vivid settings. Her mentor and friend, the late Robert Creeley, would be proud. It’s a great pleasure to see Kate Cumiskey‘s latest poems gathered in this fine book.

–Peter Meinke, poet laureate of Florida

Rooted in place, the poems in Kate Cumiskey’s collection The Women Who Gave Up Their Vowels span generations of a family raised in a Florida beach town, where “South of the jetties, cars crowd up to the high-tide poles. Coolers, surfboards, /guitars, woofers, towels, diapers…” comprise the landscape. A great love of this place, and the people who inhabit Cumiskey’s past and present sweeps through the pages of this collection giving voice to the daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, neighbor and teacher poet. Thank you, Kate Cumiskey, for this “giving us something to cling to when the hard times came.” We’ve never needed these poems more than now.

–Marjory Wentworth