In Velvet

Jeanne Bryner works language, opens it unexpectedly, pries meanings and memories, spins gold from mud, and always hears and speaks the sorrows and hopes of working people. This collection is restorative, an immense and moving achievement. -Janet Zandy

Jeanne Bryner asks of us, "Where are the great studies on buried miners/burned women, displaced steel workers/the lost towns gutted like deer/people left to choose between the river and the sky?" In this new collection of poetry, Bryner celebrates and mourns those unstudied and unsung. With stunning specificity, she catalogs their courage: the nurse who, from a blue paper cup, baptizes a dying husband; the firefighter kneeling beside the gurney of a toddler; a schoolteacher carrying a disabled child "down/every/single/step/in those ivory pumps." Bryner's tender rendering of the unsung reminds us of our fleeting connection between the river and sky. - Geraldine Gorman