Beleaguered Oases

by Ann Tweedy

 In Beleaguered Oases, a surprising bestiary—fox, hummingbird, moth, newt—gathers to impart its wisdom on the most displaced member among them—the human animal. Ann Tweedy’s poetry is a lyrical celebration of the emotional truths and hard-won lessons that speak to us through the natural world. For those who feel disoriented by the “ecstatic cacophony” of our harried lives, never fear, the still-water clarity of these poems is healing.  Listen: “home is the structure you build when nowhere else will have you.”

       – Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa

Ann Tweedy’s poems are finely tuned soul-breaking songs of empathy and engagements with longing. These poems always look to the transformative, as bodies, natural affinities and words seeking spirit and wholeness. With Tweedy’s work we enter into in a natural quiet observation, into ironies of contemporary life. In these oases, beleaguered by time, hope, futility and humor, readers will find real poetry, considerate and direct, lyrical and mystifying, with an eye, ear and heart, for image, speech, rhythm and situation, in poems cast with sensual immersion in ways of the world and people. I look forward to reading more of Tweedy’s work in days to come.

       – Gordon Henry Jr., author of The Light People and The Failure of Certain Charms and Other Disparate Signs of Life