Lake Diving by Janet Lee Warman

All of life is here in these poems that have an eye for what matters. Janet Warman shies away from nothing in her poetry that is observant, beautifully shaped, and winning in its openness and warmth.

–Kevin Boyle, author of A Home for Wayward Girls and astir Reading

Janet Warman‘s Lake Diving is a lesson in “see[ing] the image upside down / and know[ing] that it will bloom / in perfect proportions / when righted.” From the opening poem “Dark,” in which the blind woman can’t see the child nearby, to the closing poem “The Back Float,” in which someone is watching as the speaker conjures a wave and launches off to swim, the poems shimmer with the sure knowledge of a life spent learning to ascend out of the difficult past-learning to rise “through the water,” whether the water is literal or is the wavy image in a photograph.

–Connie Jordan Green, author of Regret Comes to Tea, Slow Children Playing, and Household Inventory

In this moving collection of spare, straightforward poems, Janet Lee Warman dives below the surface of memory, “plunging toward the familiar” to “dig out the holiness” that lives in each of our stories “one small scratch at a time.”

–Grace Bauer, author of Retreats & Recognitions and Nowhere All At Once