At the Well of Flowers

"Though flowers have spoken before in poetry, they have seldom done so with such steadfast courage and sheer pluck as they do in Sandra Becker's heartbreakingly beautiful At the Well of Flowers. In this often wry, always wise book the poet explores "How light feeds on darkness/and how darkness feeds on light." In its pages we encounter stash houses, tormented monkey men, desperate thirsts, wrong turns, miscarriages, a parent's soiled undergarments, the dagger of merciless logic, cattle prods, rage, shame, and the mischief perpetrated by the world, that big cat. But we always return to the well of flowers and the story of Persephone. Sandra Becker does not only give voice to the flowers, but to all in the world who've been silenced. "Sing your song," the poet writes, "where possibility is a large sky." After reading At the Well of Flowers we want to sing as bravely and lyrically as the poet and Vervain, Gorse, and Honeysuckle." -- Christopher Bursk