-Amie Whittemore, author of Nest of Matches

Robin Turner's Elegy with Clouds & is a vivid almanac for a sorrow season, recollecting "an absence & / an everywhere, a before & an after, my trickster / mother, a shape ever shifting." These poems sound the distances between mother and daughter, between daughter and her childhood self, hueing the intimate and elemental in the spaces that bridge them: a "ruthless unspooling of days," a night ocean, white rocks, "blue lips in blue light." Turner's deft lyrics pare line and sound down to the stark relief and concavities of grief. What a mother may forget, a poem may call back; a leaving's silence may bloom into clouds. These fine poems keen and dream their way towards "the return of the red resurrection flower...its intricate blossom a year's dark, deepening."

-Sally Rosen Kindred, author of Where the Wolf

Robin Turner's luminous Elegy with Clouds & opens with a fear that lives in all of us: the loss of one's mother. In this collection "blood meets blue / a poem blooms." What more could one ask of poetry but to speak this truth? The poems that follow simultaneously mourn the loss of a mother and remind us that there is peace in beauty. A single, white swan gives us space to "practice silence," while a later poem opens a window to sky. Sorrow isn't simple and sometimes isn't quiet, as "Keen" and "Flight" show us. The collection's closing section begins with a doorway open to the future. Grief is still present, but so is memory, and these are found simultaneously in lily ponds and rain and sky.

-Christine Klocek-Lim, editor of Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY