Sublunary Musings

Carrie Weinberger's Sublunary Musings speaks to the beauty of the world in which we live as well as to the pain of human detachment from it. Her poems echo the tension in Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, the movement from safety and innocence to separation and struggle.

Weinberger both celebrates and mourns the solitude of the human condition. And she calls herself over and over to things of the natural world: the northern white rhino, coyote, meadowlark, hickory tree, mushroom, and pine cone. Her ear, she says, is "pressed / to the bark of a tree, so I can hear the murmur of sap, / surging from root to limb to leaf." Her poetry affirms that the non-human and the human are not two, but one. She is a poet of the earth and of the heart.

-Steve McDonald, Credo, House of Mirrors

The poems in Sublunary Musings shimmer and sing. Carrie Weinberger sees the sacred in unexpected things, a painting by Vermeer, white rhinos, an aging father. Each poem is a hymn and a painting. A pomegranate is a glossy globe of mottled rubiness. Nuns appear "in denim habits with Lay's potato chips."A passionflower is "a spirograph of purple threads" and a "lemony wheel of pollen pouches." In Not Now Keats's Autumn she says it's "Easy to love leavings when young," She has a child's sense of wonder and a woman's wisdom. The beauty of her writing creates a world the reader will remember for a long time.

-Penny Perry, Santa Monica Disposal and Salvage, Woman with Newspaper Shoes