The Density of Compact Bone

In The Density of Compact Bone Magdalena Ball stuns with her elegantly constructed paean to earth sky water and her requiem to loss both ecological and personal. Luxuriating in finely crafted imagery of plant and bird life and intimate personal portraiture this poetry collection teems with meticulously sculpted syntax skilfully assured language choices and masterfully wry wistful wishful wisdom. From the atomic to the astronomic the poet bears heart-aching witness to our hardwired to self-destruct neon excess. A love song to beauty and loss riddled with existential questions and shattering observations blending mystery myth and metamorphosis this work is both organically inventive and ingeniously self-aware. - Anne CaseyBegin with tears. There will not be enough Magdalena Ball starts the poem How to make Lokshen Kugel an apt metaphor for so many of these apocalyptic poems that address the trials that time presents to us. It is Balls response to these challenges that is truly breathtaking. As she concludes the poem Mitzvah Your voice carries. / You are setting yourself free / you are free. - Charles Rammelkamp Magdalena Balls poems are replete with images and symbols and sometimes pictorial representations of our guilt and desires. Her poems sometimes sing of the extinct creatures who breathed their last to question us for our inhuman actions nature and its objective correlative in poetic diction. Magdalena Ball captivates her readers with cogitations on dreams failures moments of joy and despair contemplations of serious existential truths and quest for the same. Her poems transport us to a land of ecstasy the parabolic pathway of moving away and returning to the same trajectory of existence with a new promise or at least a complacency of some kind or just a sense of well-being. Her poems are a must-read! - Ketaki Datta