Leaves Falling Backwards by Tish Pearlman

Tish Pearlman’s new collection Leaves Falling Backwards is both a meditation and an animation of a soul before, during, and after a heart attack. This is not the traditional “I saw the light and went toward it.” This a kaleidoscope of scenes, images, and raw emotions as the speaker is taken from one kind of being and shown another and then moved along again. It is a wild ride that richly rewards the reader with provocative questions, shoreline settings, and dreamy landscapes. Warning—this is not for the faint of heart.

–Deirdre Neilen, PhD.,Editor of The Healing Muse Literary Journal.

Tish Pearlman‘s LEAVES FALLING BACKWARDS carries the rhythms of the human heart and the Pacific Ocean that helped form her early life in California. Little by little its poems acquire a mythic dimension and destination, this shocking descent into a strange new universe following a massive heart attack at 64. What vocabulary is there for a journey that approached the end of breath, for one human being’s identity being smashed into kaleidoscopic shards? The poet is caught in a riptide and finally left on the shore of a life she can’t remember. The Egyptian goddess, Isis, once had to find and reconstruct Osiris after he was dismembered. Here we have an extraordinary woman searching for and struggling to reconstruct the pieces of her very self, the act of a latter day goddess in a world that conspires against what is sublime about us. This is a feminist book rendered with poems of quiet dignity and ethereal evocations, a “no bullshit” shock to the heart of anyone who reads it.

–Susan Deer Cloud, NEA and NYSFA Fellow whose most recent books are The Way to Rainbow Mountain, Before Language, and Hunger Moon (Shabda Press).