Left Handed Hummingbird

In her latest poetry collection, Jeanine Stevens invites you into her house of memory beginning with her childhood rooms of play and make-believe, exhilarating firsts, a neighbor's murder, and where we learn the "Light is the moon and my mother's name." Wonders are hinted at and glimpsed in this edifice where "someone rearranged all the rooms."

We move with her into adulthood as "breezes blow webs across old glass" and she shows us "fragments and loose threads" of a poetic life of art, travel and film that "shimmer, float on small eddies, a gentle tide."

And always, there is a movement in these poems between life and death-remembering someone gone, imagining the future where we don't exist. As she so eloquently states, "ruins are never empty," and this is never more true than in this poet's beautiful mansion of memory.

Rebecca Morrison, author of Under the Rain and 92 Berrichon Haiku