This Swirling Largesse

"Lewis is a poet deft with sonics and image but more than that, casts stories of such particularity and startling turns that each of them begs seconds. If one could ease inside another life for a time and feel the land underfoot, the menace and solace of the natural world, and the throbbing of memory is if it were their own, they would be reading this collection."

-Christine Hope Davis, Skin, Bone Feather (winner of the Tusculum Review Poetry Prize) 

"These poems lead the reader down seemingly familiar paths (nature, memory, country scenes) only to present unexpected twists - including poems on Kansas twisters - that surprise and delight. Kansas skies yield "puffed clouds innocuous as the beard of God," a full moon becomes a "communion wafer/dissolving in/October dawn," and the town's brush pile is a "smoldering Gehenna." This sophisticated collection shines with story, speculation, history, and humor." 

              -Maril Crabtree, author of Fireflies in the Gathering Dark

"This Swirling Largesse is a poetic memoir, an historic, dual journey of a woman's life whose roots trace back to a great-great Choctaw grandmother and the Trail of Tears. Whether we're at the Oklahoma farm reuniting with a father returning from war, birthing a calf, hoeing a black snake to death for eating chicken eggs, riding the trail of transplantation from Alabama to new Indian Territory, or coping with the silence of a country in lockdown during Covid, Lewis always puts us right there with imagery and detail as precise and right on as it gets. With skillful crafting, Lewis turns what could have been an historic account into a poetic triumph. Read This Swirling Largesse and enjoy this tour de force."  

-Maryfrances Wagner - 6th Missouri Poet Laureate, Solving for X 

"In This Swirling Largesse, Linda Lewis soulfully takes the reader to scenes of rural life that are both tragic and elegant. In Poteau Twilight, "A nicker from the filly's stall and the lowing of cattle at intervals measure the bars of twilight." We also read about the desires of Mennonite women and the agony of being sideswiped by a car. The poems in this collection leave the reader wanting more of the skilled and tempered voice of Linda Lewis. Praise for her wonderous observations of common and extraordinary events."

-Gary Lechliter, Managing Editor, I-70 Review.

"With an eye for detail and an ear for each word's music, Lewis brings us the world of childhood and growing up, adulthood, and the world of heritage and myth-all the things that make up a good life, through its struggles and joys. You can live or relive them here in stark and loving detail: lucid, vivid, rendered with poignancy and great care."

--Kevin Rabas, Poet Laureate of Kansas, 2017-2019, While Away: Travel Poems (with Garcia and Seaton)