Skipping Stones on the River Styx by Elizabeth Rae Bullmer

In Skipping Stones on the River Styx, Elizabeth Rae Bullmer bravely journeys through the challenging and often mysterious terrain of loss. “I have been a student of Death,” she writes. And we are in her adept hands, for each poem is a polished stone rippling across the skin of grief. This collection glistens with hard-won wisdom and is ultimately an invitation to fully embrace life.

–Jennifer Clark, author of A Beginner’s Guide to Heaven and Kissing the World Goodbye

Bullmer’s poetry explores grief exuberantly if that’s possible. The vitality of her writing never allows the depth and variety of grief to ignore itself. Images spill onto the page directly and obliquely, familiar in a way that’s shorthand for feelings difficult to explain. The title does that perfectly: Skipping Stones on the River Styx.  She plays at the shore of mortality.

–Elizabeth Kerlikowske, author of The Vaudeville Horse and The Woodworker and The Witch

In Skipping Stones on the River Styx, Elizabeth Rae Bullmer explores the ubiquity and profundity of loss and grief. In doing so, she shows us how the endlessly rich, fertile territory of grief has a way of breaking, like light through a prism, into everything imaginable: all of the colors, all of the dark, mathematics, frequencies, the stars, what and who they point to and, “how similar the longing of love and loss.” This is authentic art of the enduring human spirit; all of us are better for the important work Bullmer has done in living and sharing this vision with us.

–Scott Bade, author of My Favorite Thing About Desire