What Readers Think About riversongs
The poems in Anne Tibbitts' debut collection riversongs, are about as varied in their subject matter and settings as they can be. For example, there are poems about elaborate dreams, a grandmother's unfulfilled last wish, a circus elephant's demise, and a married man's old coat and locales that range from Australia and Okinawa to small town Missouri. [...] featuring Whitmanic catalogues that rival that poet's ability to string together one startling, lyric image after another. [...] These poems are unfiltered, reliant on equal parts stinging honesty and lyric virtuosity. These poems, though a first collection, represent a long life of commitment; indeed the poet has risked it all: stability, comfort and even family, to remain wholly and holy on the altar of her poetic vision.
-Joe Benevento, author of The Cracker Box Poems
Surgeons should not operate on themseves and lawyers should not handle their own case. And poets are terrible reviewers of their own works. [...T]here are diamonds poking through the soil. The poems in this collection manage [...] to combine the ecstatic and the earthy. The ordinary becomes universal yet unique. Memories don't haunt these pages like ghosts; they live in them like spirits.
Duane Vorhees, author of Between Holocausts and other books of poetry
What unites th[is] collection is a steadfast current of love, whether directed toward family bonds, friendships, or intimate partnerships now transformed by time. This love is never uncomplicated; instead, it reveals itself in fragments-moments of tenderness, of loss, of unspoken longing-that give the poems their depth and resonance [..., ] allowing the reader to feel both the warmth of connection and the solitude-the quiet, emptiness [...] or the stillness that remains after something significant has happened.
These poems linger like echoes of the past, weaving love, loss, and reflection into verses that haunt and console at once.
Edward B. Davis, Ph.D., Emeritus Dean of the Social Science Division at Yuba College
