Your book is marvelous. It’s powerful beyond my expectations, which were
already high. I brought it to my morning nominally Christian “prayer
breakfast” group and read them “Murmurations.” The line “….not knowing
how to believe in something that we feel but cannot possibly know”
stunned these guys. They asked me to read it again, and some wrote it
down. A couple of them said that was exactly how they perceive things.
Today I read “Promise” to another group of guys who express anxiety
about aging and death. It visibly calmed them down and gave them room
for thought.
This isn’t just a book about decline and caregiving. It could serve as
kind of a textbook for folks aware that their cards are being taken away
one by one. A real public service.
BTW, I love reading them aloud.
Jeff Kane, MD and Cancer Center Group Leader
Gail’s poetry comes directly from her heart. She strives to be as honest as she can–and working towards that honesty is evident in her work. The reader has the joy of sharing her transparency and watching it become moments of transcendence.
Stewart Florsheim (Amusing the Angels)
I had the immense pleasure of hearing poems from Gail’s new book,Walking Each Other Home, at our Poetry Flash reading yesterday. These are poems as precious as tree-ripened fruit — and there’s some kind of parallel there with poems about a relationship ripened over years of deep intimacy in a long marriage. These poems are humbling in their unadorned revelation of love. It is a book audiences will welcome wherever Gail reads and will want to have the book to read again and again.
I finished reading (slowly as I reread most the poems and often stopped reading just to think about what I read) this amazing book. The writing is so clear and strong and compassionate and personal in the best sense — original, real, vulnerable and strong at the same time.
It’s a book for everyone. I love the kinds of details she includes. No matter how distinct our separate situations, we are all moving through life toward our demise and dying. So this book is utterly universal. I really am impressed and humbled by this book.
Elizabeth Herron (In the Cities of Sleep) Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA
Your words were deeply moving for both me and my husband. I don’t know that I can find adequate words to name how your work touched me. The poems were able to portray so poignantly how the commitment to love can take us into the most difficult places, yet how love walks and lives with us in the midst of loss and pain. Your work is honest and tender, a reflection of one fully aware of life’s challenges, able to describe as well as live with them in a way that is brave and vulnerable at the same time. I’m grateful for the gift of your words and so very glad to have them in your book.
Anna Citrino (Buoyant)
I just had time to read all of “Walking” on the plane …. I can’t really express how wonderful each poem is. I am going to give my copy to my brother, who loved your book “Change (will do you good),” and which I sent one Christmas to all six of my sibs, and buy six more of this latest to do so again. You have captured our generation and every generation so achingly right. And I laughed out loudest at “Folding the Clothes.” Too perfect. You should be Poet Laureate of the East Bay. No Contest. Thank You!
Gretchen Bartzen
Your book is courageous, beautiful, heartbreaking, and honest. I’ve never read anything like it. I know it will be a comfort and a blessing to all who read it!
Gail Newman (Blood Memory)
I just finished reading “Walking Each Other Home” (a wonderful title). Here’s what I wrote inside the front cover: “So very lovely and brave and hopeful and calm.”
Deborah Ruth, (Joyriding on an Updraft)
I just want to let you know that i am re-rereading Walking Each Other Home and am moved over and over again by how real and beautiful these poems are–so much honest truth, so much precision in language, so much humanity, so much depth, and love…I bow to you, hand on heart, tears in eyes.
Alicia Ostriker (The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002-2019)
I wanted to write and let you know how moved I was by Walking Each Other Home. Such wonderful meditations on life and death. Thank you for putting them out into the world.
Ingrid Keriotis (It Started with Wild Horses)