All Those Windowed Rooms by Cathy Allman

Cathy Allman may be the bravest poet in America. That is no hyperbole. In her remarkable work she walks a tightrope over the daunting chasm between the mundane and the divine with inimitable grace and impeccable craft. And in All Those Windowed Rooms she pulls back the curtains to let us see into a home—and a life—where, poem by poem, all distinctions between the sacred and the profane fade into the same holy truth. 

Cathy Allman in All Those Windowed Rooms demonstrates a keen and rare skill for metaphor. This collection takes the everyday and exposes the gossamer, linking this world with the mysterious one, the one hovering just outside our vision. Allman makes art from what most of us see as day-to-day living. These poems do what we want poems to do—lift us, connect us, show how jogging, having our hair cut, watching the final episode of a tv series, or running errands isn’t just what we do, but how these moments are windows into what matters. Allman demonstrates a greater understanding, a seeking, and the book exposes the rich inner-life that often becomes buried under obligation, and that inner-life dances, exposing the depths of understanding and perception a reader craves, as the poet writes in “In the Time of Retrograde”: “[…] Our vision / knows the future only from worried hindsight / and our mistakes. / It’s not retrograde the way / shadow moves over the places we paved, / or above gulfs we found no means / to cross. In this light from far away, / we seem to unwind backward / as we reel ahead toward what is written.”