The loss of a loved one through suicide rips one's entire life apart, almost. Lindsay Soberano Wilson deals with that loss unflinchingly in these poems. From pain, she wrought beauty, from chaos and despair an affirmation of self, as a human being, a woman, a poet. Poetry is "something to lose yourself in and find yourself in." Cobalt Blues constitutes a journey that Soberano Wilson makes ours through her resilience and love of words. She is a survivor: ultimately her book celebrates being here like in the poem "When I Climb Back Out of the Darkness." Breaking Up with the Cobalt Blues is the beacon of light.

Peter Mladinic, author of House Sitting and The Homesick Mortician.

As a Member of the Feminist Caucus via the League of Canadian Poets Lindsay embodies the fraught contraries of a woman's lived experience, as mother, daughter, granddaughter, so eloquently voiced in these poems. She ennobles a strength of character and commitment so essential to overcoming intergenerational trauma and consequential familial suffering, by fashioning well-wrought gifts of insight and intuition. As a shapeshifter, this poet limns a dazzling landscape of premonitions and obsessive thoughts, each word as from an impressionistic painting technique called "pointillism" when dashes of color are applied in distinct patterns to form an image.

While the invention of "cobalt blue" allowed much of the explosive creativity that we see in impressionist and post-impressionist painting, the poet uses the plural to riff on its emotive and musical significance. As a literary artist, she reveals in her newfound freedom of choice, extending her truth-telling abilities beyond a depressive dystopian worldview.

The poet as scapegoat nevertheless occupies a sacred, eternal space. She "pens" what we recognize as the outward boundaries which arise from an epistemology based on heightened bodily impressions transmuted into art. Assigning blame for reported past assignations simply affords due responsibility, in "How I Became a Poet."

"Queen of the Sabbath" (and the entity) is the personification of the Jewish day of rest, Saturday. An allusion that she still possesses a prominent position in Judaic mythology is illustrative of tradition and poetic context. The poet speaks of disenchantment in cyber space alongside dreams of monsters and ugly Medusa head.

"Release me from a litany of sorrows" is a rallying cry. "But the world's handprints are still on me." What remains is "a muse in a cage." As muse she envies "[Leonard] Cohen's Lover, like Suzanne because she's tameless and irresistible..." In "How to Live" the advice is: 1. Be Too Much (because more is more) and 2. Love out loud.

Anne Burke Literary Editor of The Prairie Journal