Rooms and Their Airs

"Gladding writes with astounding freshness about essential daily acts that millions perform. That freshness derives in part from the wholeness of her vision (and, one imagines, her life), in which mothering and birthing, for example, are indissoluble from writing. Rooms and Their Airs is a nourishing work." --Poets' Quarterly "In cadences uncannily imbued with the exaltations, strivings, and hesitancies of human thought, Jody Gladding limns interior and exterior worlds like no other. Words atomize on the page; pacing itself becomes a radical and spiritual force, elemental as the trees, stones, landscapes, skies, which infuse these meticulously exploratory and wondrous poems. Gladding paints with great grace 'the broken / surface where business / must go on' and the inexplicable universe that contains it, the textures and intricacies of the human mind that strives to grasp while knowing it can only partly understand." --Laurie Sheck, author of Captivity "Jody Gladding's poems are original, beautiful, and fierce, sometimes enigmatic, but never gratuitously, only faithfully so. They bring to their world (our world) a unique mix of light, lightness, and depth: a world in which human feeling is not all the author's concern--but more rare, like the human face in Bernifal." --Jean Valentine, author of Door in the Mountain "Jody Gladding combines deft cadences with an elemental, earthy vision. Gardening, marriage, the seasons and their moons intertwine memorably here. I was especially moved by a sequence of brief poems on Gladding's young daughter, framed in their turn by two evocative accounts of subterranean explorations in the Dordogne." --John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home