Distinguished by subtle story-telling and a deft use of words and metaphor, the poems in Patricia Carragon’s new collection, Innocence, speak to the heart and soul. Vivid backdrops include a Parisian café, the circus, a windswept city day, Coney Island, and a bar full of bird-like characters. Color and nature star in many of the poignant poems that draw on elusive love and the setback of time. The poems’ heroine rarely frets, but accepts conflict and missed connections with grace. Readers will delight in Patricia Carragon’s poems brimming with irony, imagination, and ordinary life gone amok.

–Amy Barone, Author and poet of “Kamikaze Dance”(Finishing Line Press)

With a palette full of confessional colors, and the urgency of Lady Macbeth wailing ‘Out, damned spot,’ Patricia Carragon speaks truth to childhood in a voice that is at once shocking and resonant. While the title of her book is Innocence, these lines are anything but benign. There is, however, a vital remnant of a happy fairytale that survives in Carragon’s poems: the M-A-G-I-C she sprinkles into each and every one of them, reminding us to hold fast to those treasures that give us permission to live happily ever after.

–Cindy Hochman, Editor-in-chief, First Literary Review-East

Patricia Carragon writes with acute sensibility, grace, and pith. She juggles scenes from her life and makes visible what the ‘wind has erased’. Made to feel unworthy and outcast as a child, her self-expression was admonished, and she was forced to keep within the lines. This is a beautiful book of poems about the power of imagination and a resilient spirit that has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of innocence to gift us all with her creative magic.

–Karen Neuberg, Author, “Myself Taking Stage“ (Finishing Line Press) and “Detailed Still” (Poets Wear Prada)