Outskirts

Outskirts: Collected Poems by Jane Galer assembles poems from two previous chapbooks plus nearly a hundred new poems. Galer's shamanic and personal poetry rides the ghostly line between the physical and the spiritual. At once self-exploration and exploration beyond the self, her poems are a heartfelt, wise, and unsentimental conversation that deepens our relationship to our own lives. Galer's poems reflect relentless curiosity about the way that words can be combined to evoke what may be thought of as unsayable. Here you will find accomplished sonnets, haiku and elegy, as well as other formal patterns that are modified to reveal new possibilities as she restlessly and relentlessly strives after more than stylistic equanimity. The music they make resonates; it rings true. Whether her themes are of love, aging, spirituality or the infinite subtleties of one's responsibility in the natural world, her poems surprise and affirm our shared experiences with keen, unblinking eyes.