Chrysalides

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If you love poetry, Chrysalides is a book as refreshing as sweet sun after rain. Kathie Isaac-Luke writes of emotional events without sentimentality. I could call these poems silky machines, as there’s not a clunk, squeak or bump in the line. Beautifully crafted, and sparkling with language, Kathie’s poetry refashions life’s essential moments into art; but, unlike life, every moment is a bemusement and a joy. This is a generous collection by a masterful poet.

— Grace Cavalieri, Producer/Host “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”

Chrysalides, Kathie Isaac-Luke’s collection of narrative poems, develops sensibilities and memories of our own hidden pleasures and sorrows, and metamorphoses us into delight. Caught in the middle of recognition, like the exact moment of emergence of the butterfly into light, we suddenly glimpse a moment that was once experience. She takes us on journeys across the globe, into our mythological pasts, and into our own homespun scenes of memory to delight us once again. Exploring these poems is like traveling to a new place to explore, a new land, one that somehow feels as if we never really left home after all. The last lines echo an ache that leaves us yearning.

— Monika Rose, editor of Manzanita: Poetry and Prose of the Mother Lode and Sierra, and author of River by the Glass, 2010, GlenHill Publishing.

Aptly titled, Chrysalides is a rich body of work representative of that stage between larva and adult and the successive breakings through of a protective covering into wisdom, understanding and light, expressive at the same time of the pain and grief required to do so. Chrysalides is, truly, a deeply moving and memorable collection!

— Robert Sward, author of The Collected Poems, 1957-2004, Black Moss Press.