Autobiography of Clay

I enjoyed Anita Feng's THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CLAY. Her deft and glorious anthropomorphizing will, if you let your guard down, coax you into reflecting on an autobiography of your own. Her poems are at the same time spare, and self-revelatory; yet not didactic. We receive from them an implicit invitation for a response of self-truth. An opportunity, as she puts it: "to carry a piece of sunlight home". Not the poetic equivalent of geology text, still the whispers of geological truth are here to be found, if you listen carefully. One phrase: "a theology made entirely of clay" has stuck with me and roused my imagination....other phrases await your discovery.

-Dick Lehman, internationally known ceramic artist and writer

Anita Feng's Autobiography of Clay is a wondrous book, the story of the mystery of clay in all its many forms. From eroding mountains to the beginnings of life on earth to the accidental discovery of pottery-making to the frustrations, amazements, and inner alchemy of shaping a clay vessel on a wheel that will be fired in a kiln and sold at a Farmer's market, this deft little book of masterful prose poems will remind you of the wonder of everyday things.

-Norman Fischer, poet, author, Soto Zen priest, author of Through a Window, a serial poem about looking and seeing