The summer turns on its solstice

An incessant wheel

Throwing off roses, day lilies, stars

The night’s secrets unfurl

-from Hot Tea On A Summer Night

In this debut volume, Detroit-based writer Deborah Hochberg has crafted a collection of radiant poems which sing of moments when perception suddenly yields to insight and illumination.

From re-imagining myth, to living in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, immersing oneself in nature, the disappointments and ecstasies of desire, the journey through loss and grief, and the bonds of familial devotion, these finely observed poems wrap the reader in language that shifts from plainspoken to playful to allusive. Ms. Hochberg is a poet of moments when habitual ways of perceiving fall away to reveal the luminous reality, in all its beauty and complexity, which usually lies hidden behind the veil of the mundane.

By turns whimsical, joyful, meditative, and haunted, these searching poems celebrate the sensuality inherent in everyday life.

Sudden summer rain

rinses the quarter

Lightning arroyos

vein the sky

-from Evening Sky