Illustrious for Brief Moments by Renee Podunovich

Art is healing, it has been said, poetry is healing. And when times are as dark as these, poetry, words that are spun from a kind heart and woven from keen sight and caring, create beauty that is especially healing, for to name the dark and treat it with delicacy and grace is a comfort and a gift. Renee Podunovich‘s Illustrious for Brief Moments (and what moments are not brief?) is an acknowledgement and a celebration of both the dark and the light, of both the doubts and the certainties that moment by moment make our lives. We need such art.

–Rafael Jesús González, Poet Laureate, City of Berkeley, California

In this third poetry collection, Renee Podunovich offers the reader a world passionately crafted, drawing richly on both outer and inner landscapes.  She offers evocative images of moons, canyons, rivers, and desert spaces she knows well where body and mind both wrestle and revel.  In poems that resonate with lush and visceral imagery, Podunovich takes readers through seasons of both aloneness and connection in a universe she celebrates. From holding a tiny sparrow to brewing tea in a wild place, she weaves golden threads for us to follow that offer acceptance and gratitude.  Here readers will find poems this writer intends “to heal fragments”… so that “something new will grow.”

–Beth Paulson, author of Immensity

Step between the lines of Renee Podunovich’s “Illustrious for Brief Moments” and you descend with the poet’s heart, the poet’s art to become undone, undone, and undone again until there is nothing left to undo.

Renee calls us to the pulse of stars and deer, trees, stone, birds, shadow, waters, flesh and blood where we attend, we journey immense moments, we strike bone. Her work is of the deft dreamer casting a sensuous alchemy, yet you may trust her to finally deliver you  “…unbound, whole, tender in the mending.” Go here now.

–Cassandra Leoncini,  Scrivener, Astro-Ceremonialist