Customer Reviews:

• "Ms. O'Brien is an award-winning poet whose work has appeared in numerous journals. This chapbook is a compilation of her early poems in which she lets her mind wander through seasons of a poet's spirit. She's equally adept poetically, whether sharing humor or pain.

The poetic Muse can be a brutal taskmaster. Sometimes she hides, refusing to cooperate. Other times she prods the poet as would a familiar friend. Consider this excerpt:

        If something's on her little mind,
        she will not wait to talk,
        But rudely rushes in on me,
        Regardless of the clock.

        She jealously pursues my thoughts
        With two brainstorms in hand,
        Relentlessly confronting me
        With selfish new demands.

"Insomnia" is a tasty metaphorical broth, describing exactly the curse of not sleeping:

        Wakefulness is a beast of the Badlands,
        A predator in feverish pursuit,
        A reptile who by dawn will devour me,
        Gulping me down and spitting out my bones
        To dry in the light of day.

"Late Afternoon in Sedona" is a fitting paean to Nature's wonder. Faced with such a glorious landscape, "a poet cowers… impotent:"

        What architect built these mighty towers?
        Whose brush could paint so grand a landscape?
        In the shadow of the artisan,
        Humanity's greatest genius quails.

"The Four Seasons" is a beautiful, poignant poem memorializing a lost loved one. This poem is best read in its entirety, but I chose one verse in excerpt as an example of this fine work:

        Or that, when winter relaxed its brutal,
        Frostbitten stranglehold from the earth's blue,
        Raw, ice-jammed throat, then I would catch my breath,
        As if I could breathe somehow without you.

Shari O'Brien makes magic out of the everyday happenings of life. To paraphrase two lines from "The Garden in the Ghetto," she cultivates circumstance and makes a garden with what she has." - Laurel Johnson, Midwest Book Review