MY BONES ARE LOVE GIFTS

Sperber presents an illustrated poetry collection dedicated to life’s small beauties and the Southwestern landscape.

This collection of poems alternates between reflections on a well-lived life and love letters to the New Mexico environs the author inhabits, noting “rolling sagebrush” (“Blue Dawn”), a “coyote by the mailbox” (“Heartbeat Behind the Glass”), and the scent of “mint and sweet grass” (“A Small Love, Obviously Wild”). Each poem offers a meditation on the precious elements of life that commonly go unacknowledged. In “Gears of the Night,” the speaker moves away from the clichés of Christmas Eve to focus on the nonhuman lives that thrum onward, oblivious, as when a tiny creature achieves a quiet, detailed triumph: “There was a snail working / his way up a drainpipe. / He’d stopped and rested some hours, / his slime hardening on the corrugated metal. / With no fanfare at all, / he returned to his journey up the pipe.” “Blue Dawn” unexpectedly locates sublime beauty in a routine desert commute to the office, where the speaker and her co-workers must “sit like computer chips before [their] monitors.” Other poems are rich with concise and grounded wisdom, such as the speaker’s observation that “some parts of us / are just dreams / it’s time to wake from” (“Wake Up!”). These verses identify microscopic aspects of life, magnifying them until they become something brilliant; the world the author brings into focus is stunning. A steady sense of optimism underlies each poem, unburdened by unrealistic or fantastical expectations for life. Sperber’s intricate drawings accompany the poems, providing a deeper look into the simple beauties that motivate her work. By the end of the book, the author has made her message abundantly clear: “We own so little, really,” the title poem reminds us, and yet everything is possible.

A mature, uplifting, and wise group of poems.