Publisher's Synopsis
Woman Who Dyes Her Hair is required reading. The poetry of Charlene Stegman Moskal is the poetry of lived experience-not because she writes often of love and loss, but because she writes of life-puzzling and peculiar, daily and cosmic. The speakers in these poems are engaging because they are engaged. The throughline for me is the rigorous honesty and the nimble way in which Stegman Moskal offers the reader insights with diction that is precise, images surprising and accurate, and tones that stay with me long after I've closed the book.
Melanie Perish
Passions & Gratitudes (Black Rock Press, 2011)
Foreign Voices, Native Tongues (Single Wing Press/Blurb, 2021)
Loss has a way of opening a door we had resigned to stay shut. Change follows closely behind, through that door which remains forever ajar. As I return (often) to Woman Who Dyes Her Hair I am taught a brilliant perseverance through candidness and uncertainty. When Charlene Stegman Moskal walks me past the words she has so deftly arranged, I understand beauty (heartbreaking as it may be) because it is presented to me whole. I need this, we need this-to not be withdrawn or fragmented from ourselves and one another.
Andrew Romanelli
Rotgut (Zeitgeist Press)
These poems were born on the raw edge of an attentive intimacy with grief-grief in solitude. An experience we are invited to witness. This book makes bare the longing, physical experience of loss, captured with fierce and breathtaking language, all while being tethered to audacious revelations of self and the forgiving levity of life. Moskal does not shy away from the difficult insights of living without her lover. She is unsparing in honesty and rich with emotional truth, all while keeping a keen eye on the sensory and the concrete-those blissful and mundane details of a marriage-"that night we were eating honey grahams/ still hungry after we made love." This collection kept close to my heart all the way through. It burns with devotion to memory.
Jennifer Battisti
Off Boulder Highway (Tolsun Books)
