WAITING TO BE BORN by Janet MacFadyen

As if responding to Rumi’s exhortation, Don’t go back to sleep, Janet MacFadyen writes, “It’s impossible to sleep with so much openness,” and these poems bristle with synaptic leaps, sonically, imagistically, metaphorically, and with a compassion for sentience — human and non-human. They weep, and water with grace. If your soul is feeling dry, these poems will quench and restore, even in their sidling up next to darkness. Quiet and powerful, a curated record of mind with aesthetic exactitude. Exquisite.

—Laura McCullough, author of Women & Other Hostages

In Janet MacFadyen’s Waiting to Be Born, the weary world washes clean, and we find what emerges in the poems is tender, resilient, savory, exact, and formally delightful. We come close but not too close, faraway but not abstract and distant. There is always a spilling forth of music, silence, and questions blossoming into the answering air. Take these poems along with you as a guide, compass, and reminder of what is around you in the sensory exploration of the everyday world. You won’t be disappointed. This is an exuberant and lovely discovery of Poems!

—Elizabeth Gordon McKim, author of Lovers in the Free Fall