Breathing Spaces - Paperback

by Anna Soter (Author)

After many years of hard and invigorating labor as a teacher and a superb teacher-of-teachers, the poet in Anna Soter now reaches out to us as a steward of how the mind enters the body again. Her work continually seeks currents of momentum to transform our sculpted interiorities into organs of sensation and renewal. In poem after poem she ponders the deep purposes of our physical selves reclaiming their newly discovered territories-as a cat "will lick its strong yellow paws when it has strutted its path." These poems strut their own path and ask us (mind in tow) to follow.

-Terry Hermsen, Professor, English Department, Otterbein University, and author of A House for Last Year's Summer

As the title of Anna Soter's lovely Breathing Spaces suggests, her poems engage us in the spaces between dualities: America / Australia, mother / son, child / adult, urban / rural, human/machine, nature / domesticity, competition / relaxation. In one poem this is made vivid in the image of a dog breathing blissfully, his eyes closed, his head outside the window of a moving car. Nature is a source of respite and awe in these poems, the place where one comes of age, is hurt yet survives, where one develops awareness of and respect for "blue dust" dangers and severed branches that can cut deeply. Birds soar through the collection, rising to metaphor for poets as winged creatures who "relearn to fly." The epigraphs between sections hint at deep structure, and the collection's themes are gathered adroitly in the final poem: language, child versus adult preoccupations, human longing, great nature. Kay Bea Jones' painting on the cover literally foreshadows the "leaves" of poems inside.

-Charlene Fix is the author of Flowering Bruno: A Dography (poems, XOXOX Press), Frankenstein's Flowers (poems, CW Books), and Harpo Marx as Trickster (McFarland). She is an Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design.

Author Biography

Anna is Founder (2010) and current co-chair with Fred Andrle and Charlene Fix of The Hospital Poets US Program for The Ohio State University Medicine and the Arts Program/Humanism in Medicine. Since 2010, she also created and provided monthly Poetry & Writing for Wellbeing Workshops for the JamesCare for Life Cancer Survivorship Program. In 2016, she launched Hospital Poets Australia in collaboration with the Katherine Susannah Prichard Writers' Center, Perth, Australia. She has been a featured reader in venues in Ohio and her poetry has been published in various magazines and anthologies. Anna recently returned to the US, following an extended stay in Australia.