Dirt by C. Prudence Arceneaux

From the first word of this collection, “Listen,” to the last lines, “eyes begging me/ to act right just once this time,” Dirt compels by rendering what lingers and builds in the gritty, earth- bound spaces between us. Again and again, Arceneaux moves between the soil and the sky with deft, musical phrasing, asking us to pause with her in the moments of almost connection, of almost release, of almost fully living before our last breaths.
–Charlotte Gullick, author of By Way of Water

Memories of profound loss and longing permeate the poems in Prudence Arceneaux’s remarkable chapbook, Dirt, but her real achievement is that they nevertheless conjure joy and pleasure and sensuality. Such complicated emotions attest that the reality rendered in these poems is personal – of the person, defining the person, expressing the person – so that in reading Arceneaux’s poems we are offered a generous and knowing portrait of how we humans make sense of the world.

–Steve Wilson, author of The Lost Seventh