How charming of Carolyn Martin to let us eavesdrop on her as she eavesdrops on Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Mother Nature, and the everyday people who inhabit It's in the Cards. Carolyn's poems invite us to wander through a welcoming--and sometimes challenging--landscape where crows and feral cats, neighbors and biblical characters live side by side. Filled with wonder, these poems offer us a world that yearns for the grace of requited reverence. And, as we wander through it, we can't help but experience that grace. --Sister Maria Cordis, R.S.M., president and professor emerita, Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey

In It's in the Cards, Carolyn Martin throws caution and righteousness to the wind to let leaf-devils swirl/dervishly around. She dares to prepare Jesus for Sunday, even warns him of heresy in case he feels the urge to illuminate [his] take on theology. Whether through lessons from gardening with Buddha or the inherent wisdom of leaves that fall on their own schedule, Martin teaches us to doubt nothing and everything as we bear the wait of what Providence or Chance has in store for us. One thing for sure: it's in the cards that readers will delight in Martin's provocative poems and welcome her invitation to become a ripple in a pond searching for its stone of origin.

-Shawn Aveningo Sanders, author of What She Was Wearing and publisher/managing editor at The Poetry Box(R)

In her latest collection, It's in the Cards, Carolyn Martin speaks of everyday mystics. Shining through each line is the light she has collected on her own passages into mystery. With humor and depth, Martin walks the reader through the rewilding fields where everyone is chosen. Her poems gently offer us delightful guidance into the gifts/of this lifetime, the surprises of the next. With this book as a trusty companion, you'll find the edge and widen your view of places where unknowns/find a way of sneaking through....

--Bethany Lee, author of Etude for Belonging and poetry editor of Untold Volumes, Feminist Theology Poetry