Erosion

As is true of the best poetry, Marilyn McConnell's work recreates the mystery, conflict, joy and magic inherent in our daily lives. She harnesses our experiences and converts them into written images which convey their essence, capture their significance and leave their imprint on those moments which underscore our daily existence and might otherwise go unnoticed.

-Diana Anhalt, author of Second Skin, Lives of Straw, Because There is No Return, and A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965

In addition to being a poet, Marilyn McConnell is an accomplished visual artist, and Erosion points to that in stunning ways. Sepia-stained without being sentimental, the poems in this book take the reader into the speaker's past, to old neighborhoods, rooms, sidewalks, and stores. In "1945," we're in a basement with the speaker, "skating round and round the furnace in our clamp-ons." Other poems render the present, often the natural world, in vivid color: the fox "slinking like guilt itself," a hummingbird running "the forest up in slapdash seams." McConnell's poems draw us in like paintings so rich with detail we don't want to walk away, but are anxious for the next. The ending of "You Have" gives me hope there will be many more: "you have/an old lady to be/a future to widen/and empty/into the rushing streams."

-Jennifer Wheelock, co-author of The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouth Jars, with Cathy Carlisi and Beth Gylys

In Erosion, Marilyn McConnell's skills as both poet and painter is evidenced in word portraits, as in: "My mother's best pan was a drum." (in her participation in a celebratory parade at the end of World War II); "the grip (her mother's) teeth took on a clothespin while (she) hung the sheets like flags, staking out the same territory again and again;" a great-granddaughter in vitro as "a gray, swirly movie;" a strange student she once had, "sixteen going on fifty," with "faux wise tilts of the head that couldn't bode well;" a neighbor "in his carpet slippers, white curls pasted to his forehead, looking up Esser Avenue and down Eckerd, half a tomato sandwich in his hand," searching for her 10-year-old self; and her arthritic dog, who in the aftermath of an ice storm, whom she called too often to hear her own voice in the silence, ran "crooked, crunchy paths toward not enough."

-Michael Walls, author of Stacking Winter Wood and Climbing an Unnamed Mountain