Because Time by Liz Abrams-Morley

“Listen, I told her,” says the speaker in Because time, “for the sounds/You cannot hear.”

The poems in Liz Abrams-Morley newest collection ask readers to simultaneously reach into the future while redefining the past. Words anchor us to both and all moments co-exist. “This is why I make poems, make collages,” Abrams-Morley writes. The imagined future holds both hope and fear for the children. “Tell yourself that any ordeal will strengthen them.  Tell yourself that.  Go on, I dare you.”  As for the past, “Think of the magnolia petals, how, in your hometown, they opened like fireworks.” The poems in this remarkable collection root us in Time’s circle so we are always amazed, but never lost.

–Lois Roma-Deeley, Poet Laureate, Scottsdale, Arizona, author of Like Water in the Palm of My Hand

“How you say the world, I learned/Is how you see it.” In Because Time, Liz Abrams-Morley fiercely says and sees our human situations, from the “siren-slashed” crimes against women and children, to generational transfer and the sly nature of time. Her poems are necessity and balm. Read them, return to them.

–Tracy Robert, author of Flashcards and the Curse of Ambrosia

The unforgettable poems of Because Time flare up from shards of memory lodged in the body and told in glints and glimpses of “life after so much death.” Liz Abrams-Morley has undertaken a rumination on disruption—assassination, insurrection, school shootings, war, a botched abortion, a mother’s sorrow, her nephew’s shiva—collaged from scraps of family stories, some of them her own.  The poems themselves are acts of interruption, like oral tales whose digressions create space for unexpected possibilities and images of resilience. Dedicated to the next generation, this collection is intended to keep them alive and “crazy for hope” in their “unprecedented” future.

–J. C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair