The Yellow Sweater

These poems give an authentic sense of life lived with all senses alert to the mystery and richness that surround us. In The Yellow Sweater, Margot Wizansky, a poet and visual artist with an impeccable eye for detail, provides readers intimate glimpses into the landscapes of her life: childhood, long-loving marriage, her soul, its affinity to our tenuous underpinnings, and the landscape of one who came back from a near-death experiences with heightened sense of this world we're fortunate enough to inhabit. Her poems are funny, compassionate, often exalting, as in the poem "Exaltation:" "clear madrigals/ soaring past a multitude / of polychrome saints scaling the Gothic arches / to a place I've never been, / a place I might fly." The Yellow Sweater invites us to fly.

-Grey Held, author of WORKaDAY



There is a tender ability in The Yellow Sweater to peer into the fabric of the people from whom the author has knitted her life. Margot Wizansky captures her parent's marriage, the complexity of their relationship, her father's battle with heart disease, her mother's later dementia. She is unblinking in telling secrets kept by loved ones and her own. She writes of reckless young love, and later her abiding love story. She reveals over four precisely crafted sections of narrative verse, life and death, and even the first gynecological exam. This full-bodied book even depicts the poet's near death and exalted life: "every day, the rapture of birds, / sunset approaching in red velvet shoes."

-Eileen Cleary, Editor of Lily Poetry Review Books and author of 2 a.m. with Keats



Margot Wizansky's The Yellow Sweater is a song of love in all its forms. Like the titles poem's "Yellow Sweater," Wizansky's vision of love is warm and erotic, comforting and vibrant. From poems that reckon with the abrupt loss of her beloved father and the later slow fading of her mother, Wizansky creates "one long piece that [doesn't] ever break" leading into poems inspired by a lifetime of loving people and the stunning beauty of the world despite the risks that can rend us from our beloveds. These poems invite readers to celebrate human connections and, as Wizansky exhorts in her "Epithalamium for Meghan and Ben," to "Cast [ourselves] to love."

-Elizabeth Sylvia, author of None but Witches