Salt Lick
Forty years worth of poems from nineteen collections, with a generous addition of new pieces, this collection contains the themes and treatments that have moved Glenna Luschei all her life: sympathetic understanding, wry judgment, the experience of sensation and of loss, the act of witness, the love of nature and its processes, and longing for peace and harmony in a world often dominated by injustice and the abuse of power. Poet, editor, small press pioneer, and devoted friend of literature, Glenna Luschei tells the truth and never denies her own voice.
It would be hard to imagine a poet more appreciated by other poets than Glenna Luschei."From hearing you read your poems, what I remember now is their unusually strong emotional effect, with many lines still sounding in my ear for days afterward, and images that remain extraordinarily vivid. Your work is warm, compassionate, and rooted in our common humanness, but lighted with gleams from the far reaches of inner and outer space."--Frank Waters (1972)
"I am moved by Glenna Luschei's bold, painterly glimpses of vibrant life."--Carol Muske Dukes
"These poems are on the other side of despair. They see through their occasions, even the sad ones, toward what is precious in the life one is given."--Gene Frumkin
"At the heart of Glenna Luschei's poetry is . . . a fierce love, the kind that keeps us always connected to those with whom we travel, albeit all too briefly, through this life, the kind that tenaciously embraces every memory and dream. . . . For some forty years, she has published honest poems rich in intimacy and passion that manage to balance love and loss, fulfillment and despair, mourning and reconciliation--the heart's inseparable pairs."--Steven Shur
Glenna Luschei grew up in Iowa and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she started the poetry journal, Café Solo, in 1967. After she moved to California, she began publishing under the Solo Press imprint. She has served as chair of the Committee of Small Magazine Editors and Publishers and won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship as well as a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship in New Mexico. She lives in Carpinteria, California.
