Like Water in the Palm of My Hand

The poems of Lois Roma-Deeley's latest book are like lucid dreams, at once as vivid, joyous, and as painful as life itself. And they are more. In their faithful adherence to the truth of the encountered world-whether home-life, street-life, cancer ward, or in witness to the sublime natural wonders of Sedona or Zion-Roma-Deeley's poems seek to pitch imagination beyond itself to something more like divination. These are poems that show us "how hard it is to be a human being," but which also "celebrate the moment of possibility." Like love itself, to use the poet's words, they "leave us with a deep, sweet scar." Like Water in the Palm of My Hand is a richly moving and vibrantly envisioned collection.

-Daniel Tobin, author of 8 poetry collections, including Blood Labors, named 2018 Best Book of the Year by The New York Times

Against the backdrop of the Arizona desert, Lois Roma-Deeley's powerful poems unfold, immersing the reader in a world of loneliness and love, affliction and redemption. From the bravado of a cancer patient to the agony of St. Julia's crucifixion, from the thrill of discovering James Baldwin to the awkwardness of being the only white woman in the room, from a healing pilgrimage to San Xavier's Mission to a vigil in a brother's hospital room, Roma-Deeley takes the reader to challenging spaces and places where we discover we're "made for more and yet just for this"-this brokenness, this suffering, this sad and saving beauty.

-Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor and Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage

Roma-Deeley's poems give palpable form to intangible powers that may be even more potent for their being ephemeral. Here also are frozen moments "tumbling against each other." Here, too, questions stretch across time. Lois Roma-Deeley aims high and succeeds: "I'm lifting you out of the here and now/and opening the door to the other side/of how good life is supposed to be."

-Margaret Rozga, author of New and Selected Poems: Holding My Selves Together, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate