Frogs Don't Sing Red

"If I were a window," Sandi Stromberg writes, "I could frame a world of possibilities." In Frogs Don't Sing Red, she does just that, offering us a story of a restless life in beautiful, often deeply moving poems. Here, she meditates on the disappointments of parents, the complex joys of motherhood, and the sorrows and highs of marriage. Or she considers the strangeness of home and travel, the vagaries of memory and desire, "the owl of death hovering." United by voice, clarity, and intelligence, Stromberg's poems do what I love most in poetry: they create a sense of a complex speaker I want to listen to, someone I want to know. This is a marvelous book, one I'll return to with pleasure.

-Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them, and others. Co-Curator, The Unsung Masters Series



Sandi Stromberg is a master of the craft of poetry, particularly ekphrastic poetry. Here are stunning jewels that take us deeper into our interior world and transport us outside of ourselves simultaneously. Her inspiration and influence are so often from art, something her words teach us to look at with our whole soul. These poems are tightly woven around vivid details. Images spell out the everyday. Yet, they also double as epic motifs and symbols. Her poetry confronts death as courageously as it confronts life, always juggling the beauty and pain of all that is right in front of us, with honesty and candor.

-Lorette C. Luzajic, editor, The Ekphrastic Review



"Moments of Prayer"-that's one of Sandi Stromberg's chapter titles in this remarkable new collection. It's an apt title: each poem reads like prayer distilled to an essence, each poem a meditation, acutely aware both of joy and of loss. Stromberg's husband died during the writing of Frogs Don't Sing Red. "The presence of your absence insists I mourn," she writes. "Grief plays hide and seek." And this: "Now only / my passport knows my name." Readers will find heartbreaking beauty in these pages-and the strength of someone who knows she must go on. And does.

-David Meischen, author of Anyone's Son, Best First Book of Poetry, Texas Institute of Letters