Valley Meditation (with Palomino) by PB Rippey

In poems of narrative and lyric complexity PB Rippey weaves the daily concerns we all share – love, work, children, family, memory and personal history – into moments of quiet epiphany and redemption, into the realization that every moment is grace if we can see it.

–Chris Abani, Sanctificum and Hands Washing Water 

PB Rippey gazes beyond Los Angeles to the San Fernando Valley, collecting its history and hazy views into an elegance to be treasured through its tarnish. These poems are trail maps that lead beyond the Hollywood sign to reveal “California-a spine brown / as the air blurring scarred peaks.” In the Valley, if a lover confesses his belief in past lives as a dolphin, sea turtle, or soldier, she opens “I like it. How can I / not?” That narrow space between mystery and lunacy, “this pocket of breathy Eden,” teases discovery where “although / nothing is unfamiliar, we are shocked / to find it here…” The sprawl is a place of rose gardens and phlox, an urban ocean where Rippey writes, “I can’t take my eyes off the sharks”-a place where the wild circles just beneath the surface.
–Chryss Yost, most recently the author of Mouth and Fruit (Gunpowder Press, 2014)

This chapbook is a landscape of the earth and the heart, tracing geographical locations alongside intimate confessions. This is a Southern California book, a Valley book, a Los Angeles book, about the intersection between people and places, between light and despair, between now and what lies ahead.
–Millicent Borges Accardi, author of Only More So, Woman on a Shaky Bridge and Injuring Eternity