Mary is a River

Rachel Webster writes with such sensitivity about the profundity of love, the errors of history, and the precipice of death. These poems attend to the flexible borders between bodies and the natural landscape with fire, beauty, and insight. I marvel at this work. Joanne Diaz, My Favorite Tyrants This book is so beautiful I don’t even know how it was made. It feels given. Kristin LeMay, author of I Told My Soul to Sing * I am mother and virgin, says a Gnostic goddess. I am she whose wedding is great, and I have never taken a husband. Mary of Magdala-disciple, lover and beloved-has been called many things. Here she is called a river, flowing into and alongside the great river of the God-Man. As the swiftest stream carves the deepest canyon, her voice carves a landscape of intimate, fragile beauty. Rachel Jamison Webster has given us a mesmerizing collection of poems about love’s bliss, its rage against death, and its bewildered passage through and beyond it. –Barbara Newman, author of God and the Goddesses