Iron Into Flower

"You must change your life, / say the rabbis of old" begins a poem from Iron into Flower, Yvette Neisser's second collection. Like those rabbis, Neisser's deceptively simple poems pose age-old questions about memory, identity, love, faith, and morality. And when calamity strikes-a death, an auto accident, a divorce-the poems' speaker, also named "Yvette Neisser," does indeed change her life, reclaiming her body, her identity, even her name. Timeless rituals-the sun's arc, the passing of the seasons, the quiet pleasures of making tea and flipping tortillas-help reassure even the most troubled souls who haunt these poems. Neisser writes, "Bless us all, the whole imperfect lot of us." And she means it: these are poems of healing and grace.

-Katherine E. Young, author of Woman Drinking Absinthe, Poet Laureate Emerita, Arlington, VA

Iron into Flower doesn't pull any punches as we readers are drawn into a landscape of loss: Auschwitz, Gaza, the body, first loves, and even depression's loss of color, as 'orange and red cascade/ and crumble into brown, / then earth, / then bareness.' In these moving and rhythmic texts where Neisser's children's faces are 'all that matter, ' the poet finds beauty and strength in her yearning to 'learn the shape of faith.'

-Nancy Naomi Carlson, Author of An Infusion of Violets

I relished this dual-journey of a book, where mother traverses the Deep South in the mid-sixties on her way to Mexico. But also landscapes of memory-a hike with father, where "the years have etched rings around my life"-in poem after poem the arresting passage of time; or a kind of lifespan within a single poem, from "the pull of oars up the quiet river...to "the closing of eyelids." But we also encounter work that doesn't flinch in the face of harrowing histories-pieces that "shine a mirror inside [our]selves / examine [our] flaws." In short, the stuff of art-this gorgeous arc that doesn't shy from "digging deep."

-Francisco Aragón, author of After Rubén, Director of Letras Latinas