A Thousand Bright Pieces

Linda Hughes' poems often speak of unbearable loss, beginning with the death of her mother, but also of deep connections. Her language is precise yet surprising "like a painting lit with sunlight," and often invites us into landscapes and dreamscapes that might otherwise seem surreal and other-worldly, as when she says her mother "will . . . pass through a loose stitch between ocean and sky," but that we come to realize are right and true. In these poems, as the narrator says of a long ago visit to her father, are the "sounds of roots letting go." -Dorothy Brooks, author, This Pause, Like a Mist Rising

When I encounter Linda Hughes' poems, adjectives flood me. Striking yet apt; unexpected yet understated; visionary yet concrete. And sensuous! As in the sound of "roots letting go," an infant "still soft from the womb," the "salty pearl" of a mother's nipple. These are simply beautiful poems, beautifully simple as well: "It is the only voice she has," Hughes writes of a hen's dying squawks. Her own voice, though, is as uniquely her own as anyone I've read. The poems function both as recovery and art: they re-vision a child's loss of her mother through the language of memory and dream.

-Sharon Whitehill, author, This Sad and Tender Time

Her words are often quiet - simple, plainspoken. You hear the language of rural Oklahoma, folks who know the glories of watching things grow, yet always know calamity is but an inch away. She tells stories of pain and the river of memories that flood the mind of a child trying to comprehend what cannot be understood. Her collection takes us through these trials, but also the glories of looking at the universe and learning to find peace, the kind of peace that only comes through lived years. I have been reading her work going on two decades and continue to marvel at how Linda tells her stories, with little gems at least every other stanza that make me say "Wow, I wish I'd written that."

-Dan Reed England, Poetry Alliance of Southwest Florida