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These supple, melodious poems address mortality with humor and wit, “smacked/ like a mackerel onto the deck/ of the unknowable,” as the speaker loses family and friends, survives her own heart event and surgery, and takes care of her wife as she undergoes cancer treatment during the Coronavirus pandemic. Employing spare, vivid language, she practices appreciation, empathy and compassion-for self and others, across political aisles and species-and the acceptance of the imperfect as the perfect lesson, as welcome or necessary steps to wisdom, slipping and sliding a flash-lit, joyful, snowy way to an abiding gratitude.
Foley’s latest collection of poetry searches for beauty, hope, and love in the face of personal and global tribulations…. These poems, grounded in the present moment, expertly balance individual and collective experiences.
Kirkus Reviews
In Sledding the Valley of the Shadow, Laura Foley tells the tale of how we suffer, how we are delighted, how we may triumph, and we find ourselves “immersed like otters, in the buoyancy of life on Earth, in time taking us and re-making us.” Joy emerges in these poems even while Foley contemplates “another brush with the great beyond … keening,/ just outside the screen” and the reader finds herself “recalled … time and time again.” Like the speaker in “The Beauty of the Beast,” we are reminded to “dare, in early heat, the scariest,/most gorgeous beach (we) know,” to immerse ourselves in that “sweet coolness.” These are poems of transformation and transcendence, trouble and redemption, distress and comfort where “the dark underside of the bridge becomes a riverine cathedral”-and we join the speaker “soothed by its cool shadows, floating at ease.”
Carol Potter, author of What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess
This collection is a striking meditation on “love made visible.” Its poems nudge us to pay careful attention to what’s happening within and beyond us. They invite us to greater intimacy with our lives even while smacking up against the hard stuff of living.
Phyllis Cole-Dai, co-editor of Poetry of Presence anthologies
The path of Laura Foley’s remarkable new poetry collection begins with a “huge, black-winged bat … this shadow of death” circling her; then the shadow fades into background as we learn more about Laura’s history, people she cares about, and her delight in walking on pathways in Vermont and Spain. She is a keen observer with a gift for creating concise, zen-like descriptions-not just visual but rich in all the senses. Just as I was settling into the poetry and feeling connected to the poet, the shadow tried a return-in harrowing health crises for Laura and her wife, Clara, followed by the Covid pandemic. Amazingly though, the book doesn’t descend into pathos but rather is full of joy, humor, and, most of all, love; as in “The Ineffable,” describing Clara’s healing…. “Back in the house, she practices vibrato,/ her deep alto rising through the floor boards,/ the roof on the house rising too,/ the sky opening for both of us.” Yes, this is a collection of strong poems, but it is also a really compelling, redemptive story.
Kali Lightfoot, author of Pelted by Flowers
Laura Foley
is the author of seven full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks. Why I Never Finished My Dissertation received a starred Kirkus Review, an Eric Hoffer Award, and was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press. She has won a Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, The Common Good Books Poetry Prize, the Bisexual Book Award, Atlanta Review’s Grand Prize and others. Her work has been included in many journals and anthologies, including Alaska Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, DMQ Review, JAMA, Poetry Society London, Atlanta Review, Poetry of Presence, The Wonder of Small Things, and How to Love the World. Her poems have been featured frequently on The Writer’s Almanac. She lives with her wife, Clara Giménez, and their two romping canines on the steep banks of the Connecticut River in New Hampshire.