"A Calendar is a Snakeskin strikes me as a book about the act of reading itself, if shifting ghosts form the letters that cast our words into stories, and if the house that is haunted is the text within. Kristine Langley Mahler's oracular essays model ways to read the complex world of the living-crowded as it is with relations, joys, difficulties-while providing a light capable of navigating the inner catacombs of memory and uncertainty. Sometimes, this remarkable book reminds, the ghost that wakes us in the night is a guide that knows the secret way to who we are becoming."

-Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Rancher

"Ghosts thread A Calendar Is a Snakeskin like stars pinhole the astrological sky, making a home in time. This book is a talisman of stone, of milk. It dreams and sheds its skin and lights our path beautifully, generously, past the edge of the known."

-Dennis James Sweeney, author of You're the Woods Too

"Navigating the animal, mineral, and astrological talismans collected in A Calendar is a Snakeskin is a reminder to hold space for magic and find comfort in the tension and ghosts of our ancestry. Facing the fear of who she really is, as Langley Mahler writes, 'needs to be met with trust because the universe will bring us into the places we need to face.' The moon and its eternal pull guides us as does this dreamy book."

-Megan Culhane Galbraith, author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child's Memory Book