Phantom Joy by Cindy Mitchell Appleby

This luminous collection is a meditation on the sacred search for home, a story unique to the author that easily leaves the door cracked for the reader to enter their own house of memory. Appleby beautifully weaves together visions of people and places and objects that become touchstones for a life well lived. Her voice is both tender and fierce, courageous in looking backward and forward, outward and inward.

–April Nance, author of Crossings and Carnation, published in The Great Smokies Review and Yes, this and Walking during a Pandemic, published in The Dewdrop.

Cindy Appleby gives us much to contemplate and cherish as her poems travel from the observations of an adoring granddaughter and her Southern childhood  – “She wrapped our sneakers in Wonder Bread bags so we could play in the snow.” – to motherhood and musings of happiness, fulfillment, and home. Appleby thrills us with turns of phrases like “I run down the beach of my childhood”, that leave us with lasting images and pierce our souls.

–Nicole Farmer, author of Wet Underbelly Wind and Honest Sonnets: memories from an unorthodox childhood in verse.