-Martha Rhodes

What a pleasure to have another collection by Peter Schireson! These intimate poems tell the story of the author's move from New York City to southern California. Before the Sun is about mortality, among other things: the austere landscape of the Sonoran Desert leads Schireson to serious questions about what one human life means against the enormity of history and the natural world. But as always, Schireson brings us into the heart of his contemplative poetry with wit, imagination, and warmth.

-James Arthur, author of The Suicide's Son

This chapbook masquerades as a genteel gesture of retirement, but Peter Schireson can remove one tooth from a comb and in that miniscule space pirouette nimbly between moods, meditations, and modes of perception as if Houdini were newly reborn as a ballerina. He gives the game away when he admits to being "suspended between the soft witchery of words and the rough skin of the world." Even his glance can make me laugh, and more than once, I've stopped dumbfounded at a poem's end, as when his mother mourns the death of two girls at Sobibor and the luck that led her and not them from the Holocaust.

-Peter Coyote, author, Zen Priest