Each of Anita Pulier's poems in Paradise Reexamined, seems marked by a gentle surprise, usually in the last line or strophe. She celebrates not only a Love of Surprise, though, but also the Surprise of Love, the mystery of living-and living the Mystery.
The quotidien goddess of small things here (to half-borrow a phrase from Arundhati Roy) is not an abstract attribute assigned to the nature of Things, however, nor the things of Nature. Her Specialness is found far more simply through experience. People. Family. So it is dynamic: ever-evolving discovered and rediscovered: passed down anew from parents to poet-and-partner to progeny. And there lies the hope for the future.
By the last page, I realized that this Paradise was not just the book in my hands but the very world around me. This surprise, too, came as gently as that of any of its poems, as soft and sensational as the poet's blown kiss.
-James B. Nicola, author of Turns & Twists, Fires of Heaven: Poems of Faith and Sense, and Playing the Audience: The Practical Actor's Guide to Live Performance
A look back through time and distance. A look in through generations of working, wiving and parenting. At play with things mortal and immortal, Anita bears witness to its wrenching intimacy, be it in a subway car or the Conservatory Garden. I welcome this re-examination of our personal and cultural psyche. Let us tumble headfirst into her weave.
-Ann Buxie, Malibu's Poet Laureate
Anita S. Pulier's impressive new collection, Paradise Reexamined, boldly asks us to meet the new day, consider the unlikely fruits of quarantine, and ultimately reintroduce ourselves, post-pandemic, to a world which, in before times, was a never really a lost paradise-or was it? Pulier's poems-lyrics of crowning wisdom-gently, firmly, and playfully remind us that the ordinary is extra/ordinary, that time and distance merge, ambush the known world, but our divine power to love and celebrate the joy of witnessing is eternal.
-paulA neves, author of capricornucopia (the dream of the goats) and co-founder, Parkway North Productions
