When Anita S. Pulier explains to her late father in "Why I Read Poetry" that "occasionally I stumble on a poem that delivers an oxygen blast, a poem that stops me short in a realm of stark recognition," she is describing what we find in her own exquisite works that startle and move us with the insights and wisdom they extract from the mundane encounters of daily life.

--Robert A. Rosenstone, author of Do People Look Up at the Moon

Anymore?, Red Star, Crescent Moon, Adventures of a Postmodern Historian

and nine non-fiction history books.

"Hang banners and blow up balloons," a line from one of Anita S. Pulier's poems, struck me as a celebratory description of her first full-length book of poems, The Butcher's Diamond. For that is what Pulier does, she celebrates the quotidian realities of her life in the city she loves and lives in, New York. Chance encounters, time spent with grandkids, the mundane embellished with love and a little quirkiness, like owning "a toaster with three settings: bagel, waffle and poetry," or relishing an eye-opening dinner with Auden and Spender. In poem after poem, there is a deep sense of gratitude, for a long and loving marriage, for old friends, for the survival of prosthetic hips. In every line, straight-on ovations to "the life worth living."

--Florence Weinberger, author of Sacred Graffiti, The Invisible Telling Its

Shape, Breathing Like A Jew and Carnal Fragrance.

Humor, adventure and insight abound in Anita S. Pulier's first full-length volume of poems. In "The Butcher's Diamond," also the book's title, a diamond ring holds the key to her Aunt Freda's disappointing love life and her own mother's socialist ambivalence about jewelry when she inherits the ring. In a section titled "Metropolitan Life" about New York City where the poet lives for some of the year, "Face to Face" describes an encounter with a stranger--a hip, elderly African-American woman with a "...pink dyed patch of hair." As they await the M104 bus the stranger points to her prosthetic leg that replaced the limb she lost in a subway accident. She tells the author she's on her way to "...Columbia Medical School for a meeting/of prosthetic limb users./They use her as an inspiration." Whether the poems in The Butcher's Diamond reflect family, a loving, long term marriage, aging and the world, Anita S. Pulier has a great talent for making ordinary life feel remarkable.

--Jean Colonomos, author of Art Farm and several produced plays including

the stanza play Carrie and the prize-winning Black Dawn.