Life Drawing

<p>The poems in <em>Life Drawing</em> come from a painterly perspective that loves the colors and textures of life. Germain's sensibility is generous: 'I rummage things of childhood/ to find lost blessings' and 'What is given astonishes.' A central tension of the book is the way she grapples with life's hard paradoxes: truth versus embellishing salt versus sugar blood and bone versus soul. It's a poetry that embraces the ordinary and sees art as a way to both praise and make sense of the world.</p><p>-Joseph Powell author of <em>The Slow Subtraction: ALS</em></p><p><br></p><p>In <em>Life Drawing</em> Carmen Germain captures moments with a painter's eye and an appetite avid for delight: 'dawn blooming vermilion' unripe blackberries 'green as Chinese / porcelain' a moon that rises 'like a cabbage.' In 'The Fixed Stars' van Gogh works 'with nothing in his belly but milk / and dry bread.' Everywhere Germain offers us the rewards of such devotion as in 'Before Time': 'my hand in a woman's handprint / from the eleventh century my fingerbones / in place of hers.'</p><p>-Bethany Reid author of<em> Sparrow</em></p>