Under Our Feet by Molly Beth Griffin

Molly Beth Griffin’s new chapbook, Under Our Feet, gives us poetry that honors the smallest things of the universe, values the joys and struggles that come when choosing to raise children, poetry that asks us to consider the blessings of the natural world, and what we will do with those blessings, and, poetry that insists that private joys and struggles must always be kept in perspective as the world of racism and wars continues.  Most compelling, I think, is Griffin’s clear-eyed understanding that everything is connected.  As she writes about the killing of Philando Castile, or the Orlando massacre, she offers us her judgements, in powerful lines of poetry, and places herself as witness. She also, in this carefully focused chapbook, chooses, notices, acts, and thinks deeply and unsparingly about the poet’s right and obligation to judge, to speak, to live with and love human beings and the material world.

–Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry, most recently, so she had the world, and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer.