"We are more than our wear and tear," Pat O'Brien reminds us. Observant and wry, honest and "precisely honed," her poems offer us a reliable guide to living in the momentary pressures of impermanence. As always, O'Brien tells it slant. You will savor these poems written in her wisdom years.

-Margaret Gibson. Poet Laureate of Connecticut 2019-2022, author of The Glass Globe

Perhaps her Buddhism accounts for part of Patricia Horn O'Brien's ability to see the world with her poet's eye; it is surely her photographer's eyes that provide the gift of her descriptions of the wealth of what she notices in human and natural worlds. Her native sympathy colors her renderings of a bus driver or a lone woman on a train; and the pictures she draws of her beloved marsh and shore are exquisite and various. Her gift to us is to suggest their connection to a universe both cherishing and in constant turmoil. As readers, we are the beneficiaries of her willingness to share her inner and outer worlds in these unfailingly beautiful and often surprising poems.

-Nan Meneely, author of Letter from Italy, 1944