My chapbook The Garden of Persuasions, is available from Jacar Press. Thanks to all who helped make this book become real! The beautiful cover art is by Junxiu Zhao of Chapel Hill, NC, calligraphy and brush painting teacher.
The “garden of persuasions” speaks in a low voice you must quiet yourself to hear. “I have left some things out of this picture,” one of the poems says. Readers will find a quilt half-made, a broken bird, “pebbles that hold the last of the light,” and “a rhetoric of petals and leaves,” but no excess. Maura High knows how to leave things out: to say, and to say no more.
– Sarah Lindsay, Twigs and Knucklebones (Copper Canyon Press), Primate Behavior (National Book Award finalist)
Maura High’s poems demand attention. To say so, it would seem, is to speak in mere blurb-ese. But I’m using the phrase imperatively. To grasp the depth of these masterful lyrics, you must be as scrupulously alert as the author herself to the physical details of the universe; but you must also stay on high alert, in every last poem, to Maura High’s endings, which will snap you awake, as few poets can do, to all the joys and sorrows and mysteries of human experience.
– Sydney Lea (Vermont Poet Laureate), I Was Thinking of Beauty
Maura High 