Salt & Altitudes by Mary Ann Mayer

“What is harmony”, asks Mary Ann Mayer, “but near collision?” In these finely wrought and emotionally nuanced poems, the desire for the transcendent “altitudes” collides with the experiential knowledge that we face inevitable limits and frailties, the “salt” in our lives. Out of these collisions, there sometimes comes, says Mayer, a greater wholeness, “a spin into alignment.” These poems chart that complex process by which the heart and soul grow, a process that needs both the soaring of spirit and the beauty in coming back to earth.

–Fred Marchant, Author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press)

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

“I love how Mayer loves the Earth with her words: its creatures, weathers and natural forces. There’s an on-rushing in and to the poems in Salt & Altitudes, an on-rush that’s dizzying and intoxicating. Her poems are dense with perceptions keenly rendered, but the jet fuel comes from her tremendous enthusiasm for the experience of being alive. The gift to us is that Mayer has found a means of encoding all that passionate intensity. She tells us “I’m just a body unlearning itself”: that may be, but her unlearning is vertiginous and delightful. Of course the reader must do his or her part to climb her mountains, ride her Ferris wheels, dive into her seas, exchange, at sixteen, one idea of self for another on a European train. If we’ll read this collection with a heart, mind and spirit half as open as hers, the richness and texture of what Mayer perceives and praises, will be ours”.

–Gray Jacobik, Winner of The Juniper Prize & the AWP Poetry Prize

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]