These poems, for me, underline the joy that inhabits foods, everyday objects, memories, ancestors and explorations of a poet whose imagination infuses her childhood (I share the delight with her when as a child she drops over the edge of her crib, closes her eyes, and “gently floats” to the ceiling) and sensuous adulthood, (“love in the cottage/in the afternoon/tongues hot as the August air/tangling, twining our wet hair”). Trudy Stern’s poetry celebrates a woman’s full-bodied experience — from potatoes in the kitchen and as a symbol (“the ships that brought us to our present shores.”) to examining “Is any marriage easy?” — her clear, tough eye does not flinch.

     - jimmie margaret gilliam, Poet

In Taurus in Lake Erie, Trudy Stern digs, peels and opens her life and invites us in. The poems embody the poet’s memories, incarnations and aspirations as art maker, healer, lover, wife and friend. Learning early on to make life through art from acrobats and vaudevillians that were her ancestors, the body joy in her trampoline bounce as child sustains her. Stern contemplates life by the once blue and now murky waters of Lake Erie through times alternately stuck and transcendent. Rooted in earth, blood, family, food and good medicine, these poems are grounded yet able to curl and rise like bodies, like steam.

     - Debora Ott, writer, editor, and arts management consultant

Taurus in Lake Erie is available only in the Kindle edition.