Bits and Pieces Set Aside by Judy Hoyer

“Tenderness and a tensile commitment to the exact phrase are the twinned tines of Judy Hoyer’s collection, as she draws the reader into seasons of landscape and familial love, memory and casual myth, ‘bits and pieces’ woven from a life carefully observed and delicately rendered. In their traveling scope and generational arc, these poems provoke while providing music, insight and rest. Readers will find much to follow in this poet’s voice.”

–Heather Treseler, poet and essayist

“In Judy Hoyer’s poem “Destiny,” ‘Clean stars align like musical notes.’ So it is in this remarkable debut, in which a keen and fluent observer aligns the material of the familiar – a kitchen table, a farewell to a son, a grandson’s spill off a couch – and fuses the pieces into poems as sharp and steady as a diamond needle. It’s a needle that vibrates yearnings, troubles, and joys onto a clear-throated music that will spin and sound in my mind for a long time.”

–Tom Daley, author of House You Cannot Reach

“From an ‘acrobatic gull’ to the ‘old Kodachrome slides’ that serve as a metaphor for impediment, Judy Hoyer’s poems are flush with the materials of living. Such life is counterbalanced by this poet’s exquisite and unsentimental steadiness in the face of mortality. With a restrained and musical urgency, Hoyer’s poems call on all of us even as they speak ‘New Englandy,’ in Emily Dickinson’s terms. There are many treasures to be found in this thoughtful, lyrical collection of poems.”

–Christina Pugh, author of Grains of the Voice