The Lighted Pull of Dreams by Abby Lynn Bogomolny

The Lighted Pull of Dreams spans the toughness of immigrant ancestors to personal coming-of-age, from Brooklyn streets to rural Florida to California fog, forests, and classrooms—all with quirk and grace. In this extraordinary collection, Abby Lynn Bogomolny’s poetry has come into its own—her voice both witty and spiritual, her forms traditional and experimental. She traces the labyrinths mothers and daughters walk around each other from birth until death. And at the core, an earthy spirituality of being emerges in the interstices of time and place. Open the cover and enjoy!!!

–Sharon Coleman, author of Paris Blinks and Half Circle, co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and instructor of Creative Writing at Berkeley City College.

The hovering intelligence, subtle humor, truth and trust of self-love. From free to formal verse. From New York walk-up to orange and redwood groves. Bogomolny grounds us with her tenacity mixed with vulnerability. Her herculean song shot through with light and its constant transformations and revelations. She is the poet who knows the gifts and complexities of her craft, lines lifting from all daily senses into, yes, that well-lit dream.

–Leslie Simon, author of The Divine Comic, Collisions and Transformations, and former Chair of Women’s Studies, City College of San Francisco.

The poems in Abby Lynn Bogomolny’s The Lighted Pull of Dreams offer the reader a fascinating range of voices and scenes, from a nighttime dream-flight over the redwood coast, Brooklyn brownstones along the East River, an imagined eighteenth century summer garden, orange and pecan groves beside a Florida farm house. We witness a classroom of students on their various journeys, the passing of a beloved mother, the rising of the moon on a pandemic night, filled with dark uncertainty. These are poems of mystery and longing, humor and wisdom, moments of intimacy and clarity “when we become what we came here to know.”

–Terry Ehret, author of Lucky Break and Night Sky Journey, and former Poet Laureate of Sonoma County