A Casting Off by Annette Sisson

Annette Sisson’s heart-driven poems are clear, well-shaped and loaded with sharp imagery. A Casting Off mixes metaphor with landscapes which become spiritual in-scapes filled with wonder and mystery, loss and grief. The fortunate reader will find this collection poetically rich with emotional power.

–Bill Brown, award-winning author of 11 collections of poetry, most recently The Cairns: Poems, New and Selected (Three: A Taos Press, 2018).

If you love language that is clear and piercing, value a perspective that is keen and inquisitive, all expressed intimately from the voice of a sure friend, these poems will speak to you. Annette Sisson presents us immediately at the edge of the two worlds we inhabit: life and death, possession and loss, memory and longing. We are here, she reminds us, we are here. These wondrously skillful and accessible poems bravely tell us that what we cast off may bring us to ourselves.

–James Brock, playwright and award-winning poet: The Sunshine Mine Disaster (U of Idaho Press, 1995), nearly Florida (Anhinga, 2000), Pictures That Got Small and Gods & Money (Word Tech Editions, 2005 & 2010).

In her first collection, A Casting Off, Annette Sisson engages the “glistening thread” of wordplay to present us the life cycle through bloom and water and color, anchoring her poems in “a classic present.” In the trill and petal, the moon striking gold, and the unexpected stun of an eclipse, Sisson displays the skill of playing “etudes with byzantine fingerings.”

–Dana Malone, poet, workshop leader, and host of “Writings on the Wall” in Nashville, TN