Seamless

by Linda Tomol Pennisi

“Pennisi’s power is in her ability to precisely and hauntingly spell out a phenomenological wellness or illness with words, to detect fragility, failure, beauty — and more often than not, their co-existence.”

—The Southeast Review

“Pennisi seems to know intuitively those lessons that Rilke’s ‘young poet’ had to be taught: that poetic imagery must be drawn from the depth of one's experiences and obsessions rather than willed into being.”

—Readerville.com

“This work is extraordinarily sensuous, tracing the movement of bodies through trauma to revelation, through fear to inspiration.  And while there is a certain delicacy here, there is also a great deal of confidence.  These poems are mature and sure of themselves.”

— New Pages

“Amid a landscape fecund and austere, daily and mythic, past and present and timeless, and with perfect pitch for the images and cadences of sadness and possibility, Linda Pennisi negotiates the life, the lives, of women, that ‘fragility of saneness.’ ”

—Robin Behn

“Presenting a poetry of ballerinas and birds, of blood and garden, Linda Pennisi surveys the boundaries of what seems — between coal seam and scar, between place and body, between the sowing and the harvest. Celebratory, sensuous, concentrated, and radiant, this is a poetry of mouths.”

—Patrick Lawler

“[Linda Pennisi] asks the lyric to do the difficult but essential work of erasing the boundaries between Eros and spirit, between the mythic and the quotidian, and she undertakes this task with poise, persistence, and a deft command of free verse form. Seamless is a splendid debut.”

—David Wojahn