The gentle, light-filled poems of Cristina M. R. Norcross are just the medicine we need for these disturbing and distressing times. Reading The Poetry Apothecary is like taking that first step into a healing room, where all are welcome, where wonder and woundedness are equally honored and given shape. I love that she has divided the book into sections, each of which offer their own prescriptions for whatever might ail us. These poems help us see more deeply into the texture of our lives, and show us how we might learn to love the smaller things we often speed past: "every cell singing its praises . . . every moment folding itself into Now." These poems create "a blueprint of possibility/imprinted on the surface" of each new page.
-James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart and Kindness Will Save the World
We have come to know Cristina M. R. Norcross's poetry as a kind of heartwork or communion. The Poetry Apothecary continues that vocation, using her gifts of language and compassion to invite disparate, divided, and isolated souls into connection. Pain, despair, illness, and grief are certainties in the experience of being human, but Norcross gently persists in showing us the small miracles that are just as much a part of the truth of our existence. This unforgettable apothecary of beauty, nature, tenderness, and creation opens our eyes and hearts to hope and healing. Norcross coaxes us to see how much the tiniest, most ordinary moments are epic, sensual, and profound-how much they look like love.
-Lorette C. Luzajic, founding editor, The Ekphrastic Review and The Mackinaw
The Poetry Apothecary is a book for those who live in the too real world of illness and sorrow, the world where lives sometimes break. These poems by Norcross love even the shards, the "pain body," the "sharp knife cuts of memory." Tenderly, musically, the author shares her own stories of loss and healing. Offered like a prescription, the lyrics teach us how to "untie the ego," "knit ourselves together," and, most importantly, "how life becomes a poem." If poetry is medicine, you will find it here.
-Kimberly Blaeser, author of Ancient Light and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate
