PRAISE FOR ABANDONED SIGHTINGS AND HISTORIOGRAPHIES
“These sure, delicate poems establish an intuitive connection with a range of personae–Joan of Arc, Penelope, and a migrant farm woman, to name a few. And each poem evokes its persona in no small part by rendering the world through his or her eyes via deft, calligraphic strokes, offering images that seem etched into the page and resonate before our own eyes as though preserved on wood or silkscreen.”
— LESLIE ULLMAN
author of Dreams by No One’s Daughter and Slow Work Through Sand
“If, in these lovely poems, we do not discover what we need to know to complete ourselves, we are shown much of the way. Just over there in the Van Gogh or in the Vermeer painting; there in the southwestern landscape echoing ghost voices of Navajo women; in the Russian or Japanese folktale; in the Greek myth lie the understanding we seek to end our longing. Still, the light fades, and, humans, we cannot see quite yet what we need to see. That is how life is. That is what these sightings capture.”
— ANTHONY BUSKOSKI
author of North of the Port and Children of Strangers
“In her lovely collection, Fawson seeks both to see and to see through, and tends with exquisite care the landscapes and surfaces of her poems–from her own American west to Van Gogh’s Arles, Vermeer’s interiors, the photography of Joseph Sudek, a cloud gazed at by the mystic Julian Norwich from her solitary cell. Desert, mountain; tree branch, light; Fawson reads the outward according to her unerring intuition that there is something indwelling….Fawson’s sightings are not merely astonishing; they offer hope.”
— NANCY EIMERS
author of Destroying Angel and No Moon
