““Mary Dezember’s new collection is enormous in scope, technical skill and experiment, and surprise. An enormous achievement. Poems like ‘Skin Traveler’ are sudden master poems that surprise and please: ‘Your body is a map of everywhere I want to go./Yet I can see none of these places are on earth./With you, I become otherworldly,/a skin traveler. . .’

“Above all her precinct is love. With the variety of Sappho’s solitudes, sensualities, and ironic humor, she gives us her galaxies and moon, in movement like everything on earth, before her observing and transforming eye. Read her and be transformed.””

““In the searching poems of Earth-Marked Like You, Mary Dezember tracks the vicissitudes, challenges, and triumphs of the soul trapped in a body—writing passionately of the ‘memories we hide in our bodies’ and ‘harvested farmlands of pain,’ alongside ‘drifts of kindness like/Banners of snowflakes warming the sky’ and the soul’s ultimate freedom: ‘Nakedness is not our clothes falling away,/but our bodies, our bodies flung off finally,/freeing us . . . .’ These are poems of a life’s journey and hard-won knowledge.”

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““Mary Dezember’s poetry is a blend of lyrical intensity, grounded in scenes of real life. Her often startling juxtapositions raise large questions, and explore layers of different kinds of loss. Her work has a rich sense of place, beautifully and sometimes starkly set in the New Mexico landscape. In Dezember’s poetry, which pushes against a ‘fixed life’ toward another, there is ultimately, a deep sense of hope that is uplifting.””