Earth-Marked Like You

Ordering information below.

Sunstone Press, Publisher

““Mary Dezember’s new collection is enormous in scope, technical skill and experiment, and surprise. An enormous achievement. Poems like ‘Skin Traveler’ are sudden master poems that surprise and please: ‘Your body is a map of everywhere I want to go./Yet I can see none of these places are on earth./With you, I become otherworldly,/a skin traveler. . .’

“Above all her precinct is love. With the variety of Sappho’s solitudes, sensualities, and ironic humor, she gives us her galaxies and moon, in movement like everything on earth, before her observing and transforming eye. Read her and be transformed.””
— Willis Barnstone, author of Life Watch  and The Restored New Testament
““In the searching poems of Earth-Marked Like You, Mary Dezember tracks the vicissitudes, challenges, and triumphs of the soul trapped in a body—writing passionately of the ‘memories we hide in our bodies’ and ‘harvested farmlands of pain,’ alongside ‘drifts of kindness like/Banners of snowflakes warming the sky’ and the soul’s ultimate freedom: ‘Nakedness is not our clothes falling away,/but our bodies, our bodies flung off finally,/freeing us . . . .’ These are poems of a life’s journey and hard-won knowledge.”
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— Carol Moldaw, author of So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems and The Widening
““Mary Dezember’s poetry is a blend of lyrical intensity, grounded in scenes of real life. Her often startling juxtapositions raise large questions, and explore layers of different kinds of loss. Her work has a rich sense of place, beautifully and sometimes starkly set in the New Mexico landscape. In Dezember’s poetry, which pushes against a ‘fixed life’ toward another, there is ultimately, a deep sense of hope that is uplifting.””
— Diane Thiel, author of Echolocations and Resistance Fantasies
““Dezember’s work and artistry are defined by her search for soul and her use of poems to speak on her soul’s behalf. The result is edgy, raw, and sensual . . .Despite her losses, Dezember remains an optimist, testing her theory about the existence of soul-love again and again.””
— Alice Osborn, from the review in The Pedestal Magazine

With a voice both sensual and spiritual, the poetry of Earth-Marked Like You presents the body as a temporal and spatial expression of the soul. These poems suggest that our passion as human beings is to transcend our ordinary lives so we can feel the excitement of the life force and that we use our bodies in our attempts to do this. A quest for the integration of human intellect, physicality and spirituality, this collection explores love, risk and faith. While we are on Earth, we are human, souls with bodies, spiritual yet Earth-marked.

— from the back cover of Earth-Marked Like You, Sunstone Press, 2011

Book Cover Painting Art: Sun Shining Through by Eric Wallis

Click below to read:

Review of Earth-Marked Like You by Alice Osborn in The Pedestal Magazine

Customer Reviews of Earth-Marked Like You on Amazon