Under Glass by Victoria Woolf Bailey

If you resist Marie Kondo and Swedish death cleaning, Under Glass is the poetry collection for you. Victoria Woolf Baily is the Pied Piper of Stuff. She celebrates the child peering from a garage sale frame, dead butterflies, and pickled poke. A 1933 photo of an insurance salesmen’s convention reminds her that no one can say any longer what happened. Her flute takes us on our own journeys with stuff and all those connected to it.  This is a poignant and human book that you won’t put down.

–Gail Chandler, author of Where the Red Road Meets the Sky

Stuff, stuff, stuff. We all have it. Unique collections, found treasures, yard sale must-haves, “pictures of big-eyed girls”, “window frames.” Things we hold onto like lostrelationships, old memories — the beautiful, the bizarre. The poems in Under Glass by Victoria Woolf Bailey are like etchings on smoked glass. They make transparent the force to gather the discarded, the lost, what we may use some day, even a glimpse into the world of true hoarding. Bailey lets us peer into the inexorable light of a need without obscuring our ability to see “we are always searching for something we have lost.”​

–Georgia Wallace, Green River Writers poet, author of The Coming Fall  

Victoria Bailey’s Under Glass is crammed with Things and stirs in the reader an urge to rush to the nearest Salvation Army store, dump, or up to the attic and start digging.  These poems illustrate the sometimes-illusive truth that treasures wait everywhere, ready to be discovered.
–Mary E. O’Dell – author of A Dangerous Man and Poems for The Man Who Weighs Light