ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Abigail Brandt is a West Coast native. She has produced and directed numerous arts and literary events, edited poetry journals, and served as a poetry event consultant for universities, booksellers, and libraries. She co-founded and directed the Santa Barbara Poetry Festival, has taught poetry in the classroom, and for 10 years led the Carpinteria Poetry Workshop, a private writing group of award-winning poets. Her poetry has won statewide contests in both California and Oregon. Her poems have appeared in literary journals including Art/Life, Café Solo, Calyx, rivertalk, Spectrum, and Talus & Scree; and in various anthologies, including California’s Wild Edge; The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place; Intimate Kisses; and Red Tiles, Blue Skies: More Tales of Santa Barbara. She lives in Salem, Oregon with her husband Werner Brandt.

What people are saying about Bones of My Life…

This long-awaited collection is a cornucopia of gifts bringing awareness and depth to our days. The poet’s power of imagery generates colors, shapes, and sounds to enliven the senses, lingering in the mind. With her mastery of pace and rhythm, lines taut with drama and impact, her poems pulse with life.

—Joanna Macy, author, World as Lover, World as Self

A lovely book of quiet poems that explore the inner life. Stark sentences accrue in the voice of a woman in a blue bathrobe who scans the world for its patches of hidden mystery, both its blooms and its bones.

—Dorianne Laux, author, Only As The Day is Long

Breaking free from reticence, from a poet’s awakened mind, these poems testify for moments of epiphany, where you memorize the night, you beat all your wings, and a dog licks sadness from your hand. By such images and commands, this book will open your spirit to the changes required for deeper awareness. You will return to these poems when you need to be healed, and revealed.

—Kim Stafford, author, Singer Come from Afar

In Abigail Brandt’s Bones of My Life, we lucky readers encounter a bridegroom who “gathers handfuls / of yellow blossoms. // The tips of his long fingers / are the color of port wine. / A prayer circle // of chanting bees / follows him as he picks.” Here, we become honored guests in Brandt’s spiritual, celebratory world. Couched in sensual, evocative imagery, her poems offer story, song, and personal history that are rich and moving. On the pages of this lovely first collection, we find “amber memory full of inclusions”: poetry’s inimitable gift.

—Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita

What does one look for in poetry? Exquisite language, surprising insight, empathetic wisdom, affinity with the common experience, pleasure. All these are present on every page of Abigail Brandt’s remarkable book, Bones of My Life. “There simply isn’t a room/ large enough for this dance,” she tells us in the extraordinary poem, “Exhalation.” Yet in poem after poem, she finds such a room as a recurring metaphor that pulls the outside world inside a single self, “She who cannot look away.”

—David Oliveira, author, As Everyone Goes

Immediately I admired the honest lyricism in Bones of My Life—the voice that knows the necessary music of the particular, an eye for the resonant specific as it connects naturally to a larger, more expansive, yet modest vision. You could almost say “spiritual” to describe these poems, though they are consistently grounded in deep human experience and yet in the stars and illuminations of life on earth.

—Christopher Buckley

Abigail Brandt’s Bones of My Life finds wisdom in the large human questions of breakage, darkness, disappearances, hauntings, the self and others, the body’s alterations in time. But perhaps the true strengths of this book rise when image and import unite: the way a “worn gold band, the trio of diamonds” becomes “the marriage she refuses to leave”; or how a wind farm of “efficient white Catherine wheels” can perfectly express a speaker “spun around, a needle on a compass.” As this book deepens section by section, its voices affirm, “L’chaim to the family photos, the randomness of it all.”

—Lex Runciman, author, Salt Moons: Poems 1981-2016

Low Spanish Walls

Down terra cotta stairsteps,
past low Spanish walls.

The hillside, a maze
of courtyards and portals.
In my dreams, I try to go home.

Unfurnished rooms,
languid sunlight and dust,
an abrupt view of the sea.

The waves, their rhythm.
Bay window, the taste of tears.

Light and shadow.
Patterns shift.

I rub my knuckle
against the cool, thick wall
until I bleed.