CRACKED OPEN by Thayer Cory

“Abundance is our calling,” writes Thayer Cory in her debut collection Cracked Open, and indeed in verse after verse, we are led generously into the abundance of things. Woven from a life consciously lived, this collection is also deeply hospitable, an insistent invitation to prayerful awareness.  Gratitude imbues the poems, born from the realization that every need is “a chance for light to break through.” How grateful we must be for this poet whose wisdom has found “a voice within my voice,” a voice generously shared.

–Sofia M. Starnes, Poet Laureate of Virginia, 2012-2014, Author of Fully Into Ashes and other works

Thayer Cory’s poems in Cracked Open examine the wounds and sorrows of our daily lives, but they repeatedly search for ways to redress them.  As she says at the end of “This Still House,” “I must rise / into what life I have left / and walk jubilantly, / into our wounded world.”  If she reveals painful realities, she also praises the simple beauty she finds in nature and the virtues she finds in ordinary people.  An epigraph from Leonard Cohen—“There is a crack in everything.  That is how the light gets in.—testifies to her ability to see both the painful cracks and the healing light at the same time.  Whether she is writing sonnets, villanelles, or free-verse, she strives for an enlightened view of things that is redemptive.  These poems are inspired and will inspire those who read them.

–Henry Hart, English Dept., College of William and Mary, author of four poetry collections, critical studies of Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, and biographies of James Dickey and Robert Frost. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, 1996, The New Yorker, Kenyon Review and many other journals.