Cover art © R. Eric Stone
"These poems emanate compassion and enhance the way." ~Lawson Fusao Inada, former Oregon Poet Laureate
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"In reading Side Effects, I found what I always look for: something unexpected and delightful. As a translator, I am intrigued when poets take chances and risks by diving into exotic languages to make their poetry. For example, in the masterful poem, 'Small Words,' where Wixon writes the lyrical lines, 'Romany glides out like prayers, English falls cold, terse.' This collection is rich in history, both familial and regional. The duty of the poet is to make us look more closely at the familiar world around us, to look at it with a new light. With these poems Patty Wixon has succeeded admirably."
~Carlos Reyes, author of Pomegranate, Sister of the Heart: Poems and Poemas de amor y locura / Poems of Love and Madness: Selected Translations Vertical Divider
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"In Side Effects, Patricia Wixon quietly weaves sounds and images together, like the Nez Perce woman described in "Stitches at the Museum" whose trade beads are 'secured at intervals with carefully hidden thread.' We find endings in origins and rebirth in endings, as Wixon details the human and natural world around her "to keep the story whole." And the world of the poems in this fine collection is made whole, because observed by a keen eye, with a delicately rendered respect for what is, was, or might have been."
~Lisa M. Steinman, author of six volumes of poetry, most recently Absence & Presence and Carslaw's Sequences |