Harvest

Sally Anderson Bostroem invites us into a brief but evocative collection here, harvesting as it were, subjects that seem universal yet specifically personal and confessional: love, hurt, rebellion, identity and self-questioning. Her imagery is both sensuously familiar and startlingly fresh. It often achieves what I most seek in poetry-attentiveness to the immediate specificity of the world as it is experienced, and that rare ability to find the words, images and sounds that can conjure that experience for the reader. Her verse moves through rhythms that are unforced, at times conversational, yet carefully crafted.

This is poetry that makes us want to reread directly-for the layered meanings, for the subtle musicality, and for our own feelings the poem evokes. Anderson Bostroem’s new collection has some of the most vital verse I have read of late by a contemporary poet.

Paul Schreiber, Poetry Editor, Two Thirds North

Sally Anderson Bostroem’s Harvest moves against the background of the changing seasons, depicting them as gifts with poignant clarity as if her speaker’s voice adheres to the obedient flow of change. The poems move from the mastery of formalized verse to the anecdotal while negotiating a rhythmic lyric and welcoming narrative. The images are pastoral, singing across her pages in a keen poetic meter, backwards and forwards in time; to self, to family, friends and strangers, reaching back into the depths of a collective memory spanning from a moment yesterday to beyond the last century. The poems house a manifestation of mystery and pain, suspended in memory and enhanced by a definite span of years. This debut volume is an exciting triumph of the art over the individual.

Nicholas Skaldetvind, Author of Words that Mattered in the Moment