Kissing My Shadow

Reading Merrill Farnsworth's "Kissing My Shadow" creates the same effect on its reader as a long, much-needed session of yoga, for within these pages exists, indeed, a yoking of mind, body, and spirit. These are poems as comfortable in the quotidian world of corn flakes, flourless chocolate cakes, and Fridgidaires as they are in the realms of Persephone, Emmaus, Gabriel, and Nirvana. Here is a poet who loves and honors the "whirl...toward the sun," yet embraces just as gratefully and graciously that "tumble from the sky...the singed wings..." CATHY SMITH BOWERS, Poet Laureate of North Carolina (2010-2012)