Lorraine Jeffery Boeken

Tethers is a book of elegy and celebration, one that documents this rich and sometimes heart-breaking opposition via a variety of formal means: free verse, rhymed quatrains, sonnets, even a villanelle. Perhaps most enticingly, she backdrops struggles with plenty of detail, including quilts and cliffs and "an orchestra of kites," mussels and smoked cod, "prickly cukes" and "beleaguered bees." And though she documents with great facility, she is quick to remind us that roses come "complete with thorns, still clinging to their frosted stems." In short, she wades into trouble, including not only quotidian disappointments but aging, isolation, even familial dementia. How appropriate her title, Tethers. Over and over, Jeffery shows us how we're connected to this world and to past and future generations (at least five by my count), with Jeffery right smack dab in the middle, learning from the past, leaning hard and hopeful into the future. -Lance Larsen (Utah Poet Laureate, 2012-17)

Time rushes past like a river, sculpting us as it flows. The award-winning stories and poems in this collection explore how we change as the sands run through the hourglass, and the knowledge we gain from those experiences. Featuring work by Amanda Barusch, Cherie Butler, Jayrod P. Garrett, Krystal C. Gerber, Claudene B. Gordon, Donna Graves, Kam Hadley, Josie Hume, Lorraine Jeffery, Grace Diane Jessen, Sue Stevenson Leth, C. H. Lindsay, M.H. Lopez, Vicky Oliver, Cara O'Sullivan, David Rodeback, Elizabeth Suggs, Marie Tollstrup, Sara Wetmore, Johnny Worthen, and Bryan Young.