Beauty & Ashes

Karen Warinsky organizes Beauty & Ashes to follow the seasons of the year as an allegory, of course, for the trajectory of a human life. But the book's calendar ends in spring, the season of beginnings (!) despite our learning earlier from a speaker that Death "is sometimes there / lounging in my poems about nature and spirit... / he wants to take me home." I reread these poems earnestly wondering where we have been and where we are headed. I do mean we, for although the poems are personal and autobiographical, I recognize in all of them a correspondence and often a congruence with my own experience of beauty and ashes. I think every reader of this collection will as well.

-James Penha, Managing Editor, The New Verse News

In these poems you will find a celebration of womanhood and self-love, a carillon, meditations on aging and mortality, gardens and lakes, marriage, a folder for death, junkmen "with their scrappy junkyard no-name cat / and their watchful, blank blue-eyed German Shepherd," and much more, which together make Warinsky's collection well worth reading.

-Lee Desrosiers, Editor and Publisher, The Naugatuck River Review; Wordpeace

From the first sun-soaked greeting in Summer to the final burst of promising shine in Spring, I read through Beauty & Ashes and am moved by the seasons' weathered, psychological amp; sociological ebbs and flows, ethos and contradictions. Warinsky's work gives us reckonings and reclamations, truths casting us their life lines and fire extinguishers as a prescient reminder that we live always within the awe of creation and destruction.

-Sandy Yannone, Host, Cultivating Voices Live Poetry; Author, Boats for Women and The Glass Studio