I'm just knocked out by the beauty of these poems, poem after poem, as they swerve from aching joy to restless gratitude to quietly heart-broken horror to hope and all the way back again. They grapple with terror and violence and the abundant earth and a mother's love, and each one soars, lifting off the page, lifting me. Lisa López Smith's poems leave me breathless, and grateful for their maker, whose whole worldview might be summed up in the lines:

The truth is

I care about everything

-Cecilia Woloch, author of Sur la Route

Praise be the poet who can see the sacred in the Milky Way as much as in "the sweater with threads of dog hair." I love the exquisite wisdom of these prayers to the every-day. "I don't go to church," the poet admits, "but I have walked across the Sonoran desert." For me, that's all the gospel I need.

-Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

This poet has things to teach us. She is a reliable guide to a harrowing world of border crossings and risk, the touchstones of earth and stars, the grittiness of field medicine and farming, and the sweet reprieve of children dancing at the close of day. This chapbook indeed offers us poems of grace, but this is a necessary grace that shakes us up: "the spirit / blowing through / like a force field."

-Cortney Davis, author of I Hear Their Voices Singing