Tell Me The Moon
Poems by Caroline Sulzer
6 x 9 paperback
ISBN: 979-8-9865052; 72 pages; $18.50
Available for early orders
Praise for Tell Me The Moon
Caroline Sulzer’s poems are precise and eloquent. In Tell Me The Moon, she uses language to build a rich visual world where we become aware of the profound manifestations of time’s passage. Reading her lyrical work, we both ache and celebrate as she writes from the perspectives of mother, daughter, and granddaughter. She has created a liminal space where we can move back and forth in time and experience the complexities of loss and love.
—Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine Poet Laureate 2016-2021
I knew Caroline Sulzer as a painter before I read her poems. And so I cannot help but read these poems through the prism—especially the pale blues and mossy greens—of her canvases. Yet these poems came first. So perhaps it’s better to say that these texts were always brimming with colors and textures, clamoring to exist on canvas as well as paper.
Above all, though, this volume is packed with memories. Not only Sulzer’s own, but the memories she imagines for her forebears and the ones she transmits to her children. Sulzer dances elegantly across time and space invoking memories in order to set them, and indeed herself, free. While she summons personal memories, what Sulzer bequeaths to the reader is a gift for navigating memory itself, learning to trace its movements with delight as much as obligation.
—Aaron Rosen, PhD, Executive Director of The Clemente Course in the Humanities and Visiting Professor of Sacred Traditions & the Arts at King’s College London; author of What Would Jesus See? and many other books.
Caroline Sulzer’s Tell Me The Moon is a singular book, both urgently current and timeless. Each poem cracked me open in small increments—cracked me open in totally unanticipated ways. She’s a tender and wise writer, gut honest, the language sustenance in her hands, where sometimes ‘Sentences are violet / moving toward or away / from the violent.’ Such deft handling of joy and sorrow, loss! Flowing through the book, like a river, it seems, making a way for these poems of the personal, universal, and ecological to rise and drift, to open, is also a multi-section poem, ‘Inheritance,’ with all that word carries, including that ‘Secrets kept from us can keep us.’ Read with your full, attentive heart. You’ll be grateful.
—Annaliese Jakimides, finalist for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize