“A dogged and indefatigable forager of the radiant, Casillas takes us on an expedition to perceive the world without deception or fantasy, Quiet at the Edge a ledger book of glimpses and flashes of sudden enlightenment that life can bestow upon the inveterate observer. In word and vision, amidst the chiaroscuro of life’s losses and depressions, beauty is everywhere in her work. “Life pleads for attention,” writes Casillas, in “wood lilies’ speckled throats, pink mariposas, a rare red warbler weaving flame through branches along broken cobbled steps, a one thousand foot gain, straight up.” For Casillas, there will always be birds, their transfixing ascendance and flight belying a search for liberation—even deliverance—from containment and the evidences of discontinuity rendered by cataclysm. In this devoted amanuensis lies a thirst—her urgent race against time—to drink the world in that compels the fortunate traveler who happens upon these poems to live life more abundantly.”
–Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium