Quiet at the Edge by Deborah Casillas

$19.99

*****
“A dogged and indefatigable forager of the radiant, Casillas takes us on an expedition to perceive the world without deception or fantasy, Quiet at the Edge a ledger book of glimpses and flashes of sudden enlightenment that life can bestow upon the inveterate observer. In word and vision, amidst the chiaroscuro of life’s losses and depressions, beauty is everywhere in her work. “Life pleads for attention,” writes Casillas, in “wood lilies’ speckled throats, pink mariposas, a rare red warbler weaving flame through branches along broken cobbled steps, a one thousand foot gain, straight up.” For Casillas, there will always be birds, their transfixing ascendance and flight belying a search for liberation—even deliverance—from containment and the evidences of discontinuity rendered by cataclysm. In this devoted amanuensis lies a thirst—her urgent race against time—to drink the world in that compels the fortunate traveler who happens upon these poems to live life more abundantly.”
–Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium
*****
In reading an advance copy of Deborah Casillas’ debut collection, Quiet at the Edge, I felt the exhilaration of someone who discovers an Emily Dickinson or a Ruth Stone. Here is a polished first book with a mature, earned voice written in a honed yet graceful style. The intimate tone of her poems invites the reader to share her painterly observations of nature transformed into reveries of sorrow and bliss. Though the poems rise on the wings of magpies, warblers, and snow geese, they are grounded in a haunting sense of mortality and transience, “how the eternal-seeming/can easily be torn apart.”
–Donald Levering, winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Prize and author of Previous Lives, Coltrane’s God, and The Water Leveling with Us.
*****
“Deborah Casillas is a descriptive poet, but her descriptions are, to borrow from Wallace Stevens, ‘the eye grown larger, more intense.’ In Quiet at the Edge, she collaborates with language to bring the world closer, to discover and face the actual, where beauty carries its cargo of suffering, yet remains beautiful. Among its many “subjects,” this book is about the struggle to stay alive and open—through language—against the steady pull to habituate and give in to a comfortable routine, for there is, Casillas reminds us, ‘time enough / to sing gloriously before the stage goes dark.'”
–Jon Davis, former Santa Fe Poet Laureate and author of, most recently., An Amiable Reception for the Acrobat (Grid Books)
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Description

Quiet at the Edge

by Deborah Casillas

$19.99, Full-length, paper

978-1-64662-023-4

2019

Deborah Casillas, originally from California, is a long-time Santa Fe Resident.  She has  a BA in English from UC Berkeley and an MA in Spanish language and Latin American literature from UNAM in Mexico City. In a writing workshop in Santa Fe years ago she discovered her passion for writing poetry. Since then she has attended workshops in Taos, Squaw Valley, Tomales Bay and Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her poems have appeared in various journals, including Prairie Schooner, Silk Road Review, The Squaw Valley Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, North American Review, New Ohio Review, Whitefish Review, The Carolina Quarterly, and an anthology from Tepoztlán, Under the Volcano/Bajo el Volcán.

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