Lana Hechtman Ayers: Overtures

Amazon

Kelsay Books

Kelsay Books September 2023

The poems in this collections explore the healing powers of art and nature in a world that is as ripe with beauty as it is rife with grief.

“Lana Hechtman Ayers’ Overtures is capacious and lyrical, a compendium of poems that showcase her imagination and her empathy, her attention to the small miracles of daily life, the passage of time, the natural world, as well as to the disorientation bred of our disconnection from the real, the ancient, the sacred. It includes fables and fairytales and homages to other poets, from Pablo Neruda to Wallace Stevens to Mary Oliver. As a collection, it is ample and generous; the poet tells the story of her life, which could be yours, by way of what she insistently, almost obsessively, observes and records. And while you ‘can’t erase / what has already happened,’ she reminds us, in poems like these, at least, ‘Your life flows back to you.’”

—Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan

“These poems have arisen like miracles of what the book calls ‘today’s grace’—something elusive in life, but indelible in poems…The book can be a guide and companion for every life where emotions flood and ebb, where clarity and peace may reside in words, even when the heart falters.”

—Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

“…in Overtures, Lana Hechtman Ayers gathers these ‘Small Things That Aren’t’ and refuses to sentimentalize. In conversation with many poets before her—Oliver, Limón, Kaminsky—Ayers cuts through self-doubt and pandemic-induced isolation: writing, and making her overture to us all, ‘to write more poems.’”

—Nancy Pagh, author of Write Moves and No Sweeter Fat

Contact Lana for an autographed copy.

Read a review of Overtures by Michael Magee in Raven Chronicles Press.

Artist Studio, Condemned

I want to own the ocean, carry it inside me, soul of persistence, engine of timelessness. Instead, I walk around, grief swirling through my veins. Cut me and I bleed gray. No, you say, impossible but fields of mustard inhabit the past. Somewhere there’s a library from which all anatomy books have been stolen. This year the lavender lost its scent and its way. The serenity of salmon is the same river of their birth as their death. My neighbor is building a new porch. Perhaps she’ll raise a swing to watch sunsets, like the satisfaction of the second hand on a clock that never stops circling. My father was partial to tapioca pudding with, he requested, enough whipped cream heaped on top to tickle the clouds. How can anyone define happiness better than that?