Poetry as Consciousness author Richard L. Gilbert has written a beautifully meditative review of Tracy Franz's new book My Year of Dirt and Water.
“My Year of Dirt and Water is a wonderfully intimate and brave work, whose intention is as rare as it is sincere—to allow what comes, greeting each day openly, attending to a depth of humanity in seeking a renewed sense of life. I revel in the way the author’s mind unfolds. What is deep in life lies often just under the surface, yet to touch this depth requires a willingness to let go, to attend to wounds in opening towards intimate flowers of unknowing. Knit together into a refined poetic thrum, this finely‑crafted work offers novel paths of expression that encourage (and challenge) the reader to re‑value intimacy in caring for the world—whether broken or whole, healing or wounding. As Simone Weil comments, ‘distance is the soul of beauty’—allowing this distance to be felt just as it is, is hard indeed. The reader will be enriched by a sanctuary of words, by the author’s heartbeat and compassionate sense of beauty.” —Richard Gilbert, author of Poetry as Consciousness: Haiku Forests, Space of Mind, and an Ethics of Freedom (Keibunsha)