In Dancing in the Gaps, Rosanne Sterne demonstrates that she is aware of those acts of devotion required in domestic life to appreciate what may seem ordinary or fragmented but which allow the speaker to overcome the exhaustion, sometimes physical, sometimes psychological, of “giving and giving and giving.” Throughout this collection the speaker, who in one poem views herself from a photograph nearly 50 years ago where she sees a woman who wants to exit “into a future/she believes to be free/of rough edges,/shoving and shouting,” often turns to resonant images from the natural world for sustenance and insight: she might “sweep away the heart-shaped leaves like litter” or find her ears “curled inward like dried mushrooms from listening” or experience “seeds spill out of my core.” Although we discover the speaker did not find that future she yearned for, but one in which human relationships are tenuous and fragile, she always anticipates a better season, a time of late-blooming, when like the finch on her window ledge, she will “dazzle the paper with song.”
–Anita Skeen, Director, the Center for Poetry, Residential College in the Arts and Humanities, Michigan State University
Rosanne Sterne writes from a compassionate, vibrating heart. In her poem, three poems about art, she writes: “…my prayer of impermanence is to fill the paper with song.” Here is an artist who entreats us to join her watercolor chorus of uncommon wisdom.
–James McGrath , Poet , Author of At the Edgelessness of Light, Speaking with Magpies, and Dreaming Invisible Voices
Rosanne Sterne‘s poems are sometimes joyous, sometimes poignant, mostly meditative and always thought-provoking. Firmly grounded in image and metaphor, her poetry takes us below the surface of everyday life to reveal the extraordinary beauty in the simplest of things — a beauty that can pierce through pain and transform sorrow into a luminous saving grace.
–Judith Toler, Poet and Professor Emeritus of English
If it’s ever been a struggle to find the voice of the true “I”, read these poems. Here, you’ll find a poet who has made her way to “bearing the gaps of neglect” and, most notably, “dancing there.” These poems are revelatory, bursting forth with a quietude of color and courage. The poet says it best: “the ordinary/held up to pure light/becomes the extraordinary/it has always been.”
–Renee Grigorio, Poet, Author of The Skins of Possible Lives, The Storm That Tames Us, Water Shed, and Drenched
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