There's something going on here. She's done explaining. Done justifying. Done worrying well. She's wailing. Grieving. Believing. Bringing her healing

powers. Her nurturing. Her whole wise woman self. Looking unflinchingly at this life. After plagues and pandemics. After war. After global ecological

ruin. After injustices. After loss after loss. There's a surge of possibilities: Survival. Gratitude. Incantations. Touch. And most of all-hope.

-John Burgess, author of Punk Poems

I must/ slow down, touch earth, find/ the smooth stone in my pocket... These lines are at the heart of both Julene Tripp Weaver's poem, "Safe Space," and her necessary poetry collection. Weaver uses images from her own life and the viruses that plague our world to witness suffering. And to acknowledge that all of us have been changed over the Covid years. Everyone lives on a spectrum/ of health and neuroticism, she tells us.

She offers no easy answers to how we might heal in a dangerous world when even our closest relationships might betray us. My mother never enters at the right/ time, even in my dreams, she confides. Yet she writes that all of us can find back doors/ into the body after illness, loss and the hauntings of memory.

In post-pandemic America, this is the book I needed to read. Weaver, an herbalist, knows we and the earth can heal together. Find channels that soothe. ...Send anxiety into the earth. One of these channels is poetry.

The title of the collection comes from the final line of the poem "I've Lived Through One War." She rallies us with the lines: We must ask/ new questions, find unconventional answers...It's time/for massive change.../ Our planet, slow now with clear skies.

-Joanne M. Clarkson, author of Hospice House