Windshift

Barbara Loots, one of America's best light verse poets for several decades, shows us her more reflective side in Windshift. Both her meditative poems and her witty poems display craft, love of music in language, and a deep understanding of human frailties and aspirations. -A. M. Juster, author of Sleaze and Slander, and Richard Wilbur Award winner for The Secret Life of Women True to Barbara Loots's past as a star writer for Hallmark Cards, her terrific new collection has poems for every mood. Want something contemplative? "Relativity" and "Shoreline" are just the thing. Prefer hilarious? "Colonoscopy: A Love Poem" and "The Aisle Not Taken" will get you giggling. Loots also does no-nonsense ("Obituary"), rueful ("At Fifty"), snarky ("Antisocial Network"), hopeful ("The Healing"), and much more. Uniting her work is a sharp eye and even sharper wit. Spider webs, in her telling, become "harps of white hair." A run-over pedestrian is "deleted quick as pornographic spam," while a caterpillar thrives in six exquisite lines: "In perfect proclamation/ that piety will do/ it shrugged its fur, / it shed its house, / it fasted/ and it flew." To paraphrase Hallmark's old slogan, when you care enough to read the very best, read Loots. -Melissa Balmain, Able Muse Book Award Winner for Walking in on People Barbara Loots's new collection, Windshift, continues the journey begun in Road Trip, passing through topics from the cosmos to the caterpillar. This accomplished formalist has mastered the art of the profound but accessible lyric. Beginning with poems written on an island, the fresh winds of wit, intellect, and spirit blow throughout the pages. Her work often engages with problems of faith in a modern world, and is an excellent guide to the "faithfulness we may achieve / by learning what to unbelieve." -Gail White, author of CATechism, Asperity Street, and two-time winner and judge of the Nemerov Sonnet Competition