Floodwater

Connie Post writes “there are lost fish swimming at our feet” and indeed these poems are filled with the losses of a lifetime. Yet time and again, Connie has the courage to reach for healing. In a poem in which she adopts a lost dog, she observes, “how forgiveness finds a small/edge/a thin slat/to glide through,” and in “A Road of my Own” she affirms that she wants to “finally breathe the dust of my own footsteps.” In “Incantation,” one of the final poems, she expresses the sacredness within us all in these beautiful lines: “There is an old church/at the end of a dirt road/inside each of us.” Floodwater   is a brave book full of lyric moments.

—Ellen Bass, author of The Human Line