A River Within Spills Light, Poems by Jane Attanucci

In A River Within Spills Light, Jane Attanucci expresses the love and grief of her childhood family and the richness of her adult life, from her mother's early death to the joys of grandchildren and the bittersweet truths of aging. In form and free verse, her images emerge: from the familiar, "a child rings the bells on bicycles locked to the wrought-iron fence;" to the magical, "face-to-face with August, / the night sky's wild abundance;" and the mystical, "unexpected terror of recognition / ache of the light."

Sample Poems by Jane Attanucci

"A River Within Spills Light brings the world into tender, prayerful focus, one crisp image after another. Whether it's the speaker slipping into a swirling, blue pool with older women for water aerobics, or revisiting the smoke and smoldering iron ore of her Pittsburgh childhood in a house crammed with eight children, there's so much to savor in this book. More than that, I trust the maker of these poems, and I will return to them, again and again."-Daniel Johnson, author of How to Catch a Falling Knife

"Jane Attanucci's finely crafted poems on love and loss achieve what few books can: optimism without sentimentality. These poems acknowledge the grief that will come to all our lives, yet the poems celebrate what we grieve and even grief itself. As Attanucci writes in one poem, 'I've fallen many times / the usual stumbles... / I love them each, ever and all.' With startling imagery and evocative specificity, Attanucci reveals a speaker who wants 'to love old women, to love / the one I'm becoming.' The result is a book that relishes who and what we are-all the aspects, even the complicated and difficult ones. A River Within Spills Light is a necessary and beautifully rendered book of poems." -Charlotte Pence, author of Code and Many Small Fires

ISBN 978-1625493828, 104 pages

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