UNDER THIS SUN by Connie Zumpf

Under This Sun offers many pleasures—moments of wit and insight, subtle music and shapely rhythms—but what I love most about these poems is their questioning intelligence, their restless desire to know both the self and the world, the life we live and the lives we might have lived. I say “we” because though these poems are intensely personal, they invite us in and shine a clarifying light on our own lived experience.  Under This Sun is a wise and openhearted book.

–John Brehm, author of Help Is on the Way and editor of The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy

Generous and attentive, the poetry of Connie Zumpf witnesses to the human condition—and its various predicaments—with keen psychological astuteness.  Yet in her tender, sometimes wry, attentions, Zumpf is unfailingly empathetic.  Indeed, she proves that empathy can function as a form of imagination.  In her “rendering arc,” even dust motes glow with the presence of other lives, other histories.  The self disclosed in such “polyphonies of voices” is on pilgrimage to fullness of life, whether that be loss or celebration.  Implicit in the “Who am I?” of these poems is a not a noun, but a verb.  Life makes its journey through us; Zumpf imbues each step with vital meaning.                                         

–Elizabeth Robinson, author of Rumor

As one would expect from a book with this title, there is a lot of light in these poems.  But I’d call this light radiance—not only in Connie Zumpf’s revealing images of the ways light exposes and clarifies the observable world, but also in the way her poems give clarity and presence to the unseen inner life of their speaker, the way they reflect wonder.  This is a book of meticulous observation and vital yet often unanswerable questions about the ways we come to know the world we inhabit and ourselves within it.  From the “brash hope” of spring through winter’s “thin November sun,” Zumpf acknowledges that “our lives converge at loss.”  But her focus is on the way sunlight “pulls us upward even as we burn.”  Under This Sun is an exquisite first collection.

–Andrea Hollander, author of Blue Mistaken for Sky