Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers by Marianne Gambaro

Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers is a journey through various parts of the country energized by language and a passionate embrace of what it means to be fully engaged in the world. The tone is relaxed, the poet comfortable with the joy and tender griefs she encounters and distills through every word and line of these carefully constructed poems. Go on this journey with Gambaro and you will discover through her eyes what everyone else overlooks. So read her poems, take this journey with her and enrich your life.

–Kevin Pilkington, author of several collections of poetry, most recently Where You Want to Be  

Marianne Gambaro’s chapbook Do NOT Stop for Hitchhikers is filled with celebration and loss, nostalgia and commemoration. Gambaro writes of living in concert with the Earth and animals. These are also poems of place. A personal pleasure for me was the poem about the old Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, which brings the past and future to bear on one another, and has as its epigraph part of the song I grew up listening to on the radio. There are some heart-wrenching stories – a suicide brings his dog, an immigrant sends for the sister of his deceased wife to replace her to care for her children, an aging mother, seeing herself in the mirror, cries “This woman – she keeps following me!”. This is a beautifully crafted collection, well worth the read.

–Lori Desrosiers, Author of Sometimes I Hear the Clock Speak