Broken Grace at Low Tide

In Broken Grace at Low Tide, Mohney rides between what is seen and what is felt. She luxuriates in inventive language and sound, but make no mistake, these poems are sparse-they waste no syllable, no image. When the speaker observes a landscape or a funeral or a train station, it's like the way a camera might capture a scene-and those observations lead an astute reader to wonder whether the landscape creates the feeling or the feeling creates the landscape. Ultimately, Mohney insists they are the same, that one cannot exist without the other, which invites us to travel alongside the speaker-always in one place physically but dreaming in another. These poems are haunted, and they will haunt you in all those wonderful ways that indelible poems come to live inside us.

-Katie Chaple, author of Pretty Little Rooms

Sally Mohney's quiet images have great impact. Her sparse, yet rich language floats above a depth of meaning. Often portraying a sense of loss or something silenced, nature plays a leading role in many of the poems: "As crepe myrtles slowly learn / how to stretch and unfold, / instead I am lost / in a thousand-acre sleep." This collection travels from small towns to cities such as Charleston and London, all while settling around your senses like "a tattered cape of fog."

-Karen Paul Holmes, winner of the 2023 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize

Sally Mohney is a poets' poet, primarily concerned with the beguiling mysteries of words, content to trust her readers to find meaning in the liminal space among them. In this collection, though, she seems to want to bear witness to specific moments. After a wake, she waits for a train with her father, "a yellowed apron of Edward Hopper / light settled on our backs. A mother states, You were born haunted. An owl's face is a crumpled camellia." I could go on; just about every line is memorable, but readers should savor them in context in this unique collection.

-Patricia Percival, author of Awake with Low Slung Moon, a Ron Self Chapbook Award winner