The Garden of Persuasions

Maura High

Winner of the Jacar Press 2013 Chapbook Contest

The Garden of Persuasions speaks in a low voice you must quiet yourself to hear. ‘I have left some things out of this picture,’ it says in one of the poems. Readers will find a quilt half-made, a broken bird, ‘pebbles that hold the last of the light’ and ‘a rhetoric of petals and leaves,’ but no excess. Maura High knows how to leave things out: to say, and to say no more.”

Sarah Lindsay, Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press), Primate Behavior (National Book Award finalist)

“This sheaf of poems is a dazzling tour de force. Maura High’s poems demand attention. To grasp the depth of these masterful lyrics, you must be as scrupulously alert as the author herself to the physical details of the universe; but you must also stay on high alert, in every last poem, to Maura High’s endings, which will snap you awake, as few poets can do, to all the joys and sorrows and mysteries of human experience.”

Sydney Lea, I Was Thinking of Beauty, Vermont Poet Laureate

ISBN 978-0-9897952-2-7