Easing Into Dark

Poetry. Jacqueline Kudler's new collection of poems traces a delicate and tensile arc. Poignant, unafraid, and disarming in its evocation of the trajectory of one human life, EASING INTO DARK is a return to that life, and for Kudler such return is "a way of realigning memory," a longing not for the life unlived but for the life lived: years growing up in New York, her engagement with imagination and nature, the death of her husband, and the aftermath: the sources of beauty and richness that remain. 

“The power and consolations of family resonate throughout all of the poems in Kudler’s moving and deeply reflective new collection. . . . Joy is generational and renewable, making the slowly encroaching ‘dark’ more tolerable and even, at times, something to honor. Mature and wise, replete with the pleasures of the natural world, Easing into Dark is a volume to savor again and again. —David St. John