The Bench: Poems by Cassondra Windwalker

Cassondra Windwalker records with courageous compassion how myriad lives make it through, and don't, these days of plague(s). This collection is a chronicle with quiet, insistent moral force and lasting lyrical grace. She makes us see what's here, now: the awful harrowings and what improbably, beautifully, remains. —Edward Bassett, University of Alabama at Birmingham and poetry editor at Janus Literary 

Often grim in their perceptions but always gripping and captivating in their language, these impressive poems explore afflictions, threats, and preoccupations associated with characters conceived as occupants of benches. The experiences that aunt them and are expressed so hauntingly range from ones all too familiar to contemporary readers, such as Covid-19 and riots, to broader and more long-ranging ones like homelessness, poverty, 

racism and aging. Windwalker's many poetic gifts when evoking those characters include diction that uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways ("her gaze snags"), an ear for the epigrammatic ("protests that have turned / a melting pot into a boiling pot"), and types of repetition that by ringing the changes on recurrent words make us see them anew.—Heather Dubrow, poet of Lost and Found Departments, John D. Boyd, SJ Chair in Poetic Imagination, Fordham University Director, Poets Out Loud reading series, 2009-2020 Vice-president, INSL (International Network for the Study of Lyric)