To Find a Stone by Sherry Paige

Sherry Paige writes with the conviction and beauty of a psalmist, celebrating the natural and spiritual world with her joyous poems. She recounts the smell of leather, the arrival of a dark eyed junco, and reading Mary Oliver amidst a backdrop of snow. This is a beautiful book teeming with important questions and a voice that revels in the “pleasure to be so alive.”
–Tiana Clark – author of Equilibrium and I Can’t Talk About the Trees
Without the Blood.

“I had my idea about everything,” Sherry Paige claims in To find a stone, yet her voice is one of openness, of readiness, if not a hunger to be taught how to live among (and to receive) each day’s bountiful arrivals. Along leaf covered trails, amid early mornings, in the presence of red birds and grand pianos, she seeks “living word” to form a prayer worthy of “the living proof” she has been witness to “in the flow of what’s real.” She finds that “attention to the present is all there is,” and her poems gather all of us together around the grand joy of being in each other’s presence, where the songs we share are “beautiful, graceful,/trusting, strong,/musical, grateful/all day long.”
–Jeff Hardin – author of No Other Kind of World and 2016 X. J. Kennedy Prize.

If, in writing her first collection of poetry, Sherry Paige sought to “find out who (she) really was,” it is we lucky readers who benefit most from her happy discovery. These well-crafted poems unfold with such careful attention to sound and rhythm they can be enjoyed much like a musical composition. This poet isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions of faith, of love, and to hang on for the answers – not, as the poet might worry, with “hope too thin to hold me,” but with a strength and courage wide enough to hold us all.
–Sandy Coomer – author of The Presence of Absence & Rivers Within Us.