Disturbing Borders by Alida Woods

Alida Woods’ voice brims with sincerity and directness, freshness and accessibility in straightforward, unstinting, close-to-the-bone language that conveys clear emotion, like the flow of water. Her emotions spill over the page, and her poems always come across for the reader.

–Tina Barr, The Gathering Eye, Kaleidescope

Introspective and meditative, Woods’ poems describe how desert, sea coast, suburban gardens, highways, children, ageing parents and things lost transport her to places “beyond maps.”

–Bryan R. Monte, Publisher/Editor, Amsterdam Quarterly

 Alida Woods has a keen eye and ear, an understated yet assured voice, and a jeweler’s precision with language. As the title implies, her book’s theme is boundaries: the literal and figurative borders, divisions, and “lines in the sand” that are the source of so much conflict and loss. While these borders—between landscapes, cultures, families, and individuals—are disturbing, in these finely crafted poems they are also disturbed, if not erased entirely, by empathy, compassion, and familial love.

–Eric Nelson, Some Wonder, Terrestrials

Alida Woods powerful chapbook Disturbing Borders is filled with wonder(s). This is a collection of unique homecomings in which “borders” take on the many expectations both made manifest and broken, and promises reknit into stronger fabrics. The reader follows happily through literal and figurative landscapes of shadowy tints that only Alida Woods could create: the wealth of generations and of a future committed to other nationalities and cultures. Education at its deepest level. Shimmers of that otherness live within these poems as “petroglyphs pecked in desert varnish.” That delicate, that exact. As reader, you too will dare become “the moon, tiny and fragile, in winter air.” That vulnerable. Read this chapbook as the offering it is meant to be. Here you exist beyond articulated borders and within elemental meaning—lost in this small compendium of natural wonders.

–Katherine Soniat, author of Bright Stranger