Linda Annas Ferguson knows—to borrow Wallace Stevens’ formulation—that “Death is the
mother of beauty.” She proclaims in one of her poems, “Everything / is drenched with endings,
alive with dying.” Her work exists at the shimmering mid-point between an urge to celebrate
the world’s beauty and a pained recognition that this beauty is mutable. She recognizes that our
being only temporary inhabitants of this life is not a problem to solve but a mystery to feel—and
a mystery that compels us to make poems. As she wryly puts it, she is “dying to write / a decent
poem.” Linda Annas Ferguson has done more than that. She has given us a book of tender,
clear-eyed, complex meditations, a lovely book by a poet whose vision we can trust.
                                                                           — Chris Forhan, author of Black Leapt In

Dirt Sandwich is about love, loss, and, above all, vanishment—”an oyster, still silky and iridescent,” “the ocean, never deep enough.” For me, the book has three touchstones—the title poem, in which a woman whose husband is dying takes the earth he will become into her own body, “Midsummer’s Eve” in which we see friends between two worlds galloping through the dark woods outside a bonfire’s circle, and the last poem in the book that ends “You whisper/‘stay,’ to the small of my palm, my cheek/to all I thought was without need.” Three touchstones are more than the law allows, but Linda Annas Ferguson has achieved them and with her permission I’ll be carrying them, warm in my pocket, on my own journey.
                                                      — Lola Haskins, author of Solutions Beginning with A

 

The moment is dear to us, precisely because it is so fugitive, Stanley Kunitz once wrote. And it is somewhat of a paradox that poets should spend a lifetime hunting for the magic that will make the moment stay. With a precision of craft and a tenderness of heart, Linda Annas Ferguson has found a way to make it stay.  From Adam’s first meticulous naming, to a stripper’s deliberate moves, to Janice Joplin’s final song, Ferguson guides us through the quotidian world on an undercurrent of holiness. How lucky we are to have this bright and deeply moving collection.

                                — Cathy Smith Bowers, author of The Candle I Hold Up To See You

and North Carolina Poet Laureate

 

In Bird Missing from One Shoulder, Linda Annas Ferguson has written a poetry collection that movingly renders the beauty and sadness of life’s transience. The poems about her father’s life and death are especially impressive, for they depict not only an individual life but also a way of life now vanished from the Southern landscape.    ----   RON RASH, author of Eureka Mill and Saints at the River

Linda Ferguson’s elegiac poems about her father and mother, both of whom worked in textile mills, capture the lives of a dying generation of southern laborers. They came from the farms and hills to the small towns, married and raised their children, and worked loyally at their jobs until the jobs were no more. When her father returns from his last night on the graveyard shift, “white lint clinging to his hair / like a disintegrated halo,” we celebrate the unsung heroism of these men and women whom Ferguson depicts with the love of a daughter and the sure hand of a mature poet.” --- R.S. GWYNN, author of No Word of Farewell

Reading Linda Annas Ferguson’s poems is like watching a good documentary. I believe what I see: real images, real memories. And I believe in this poet’s commitment to preserving the truth--however hard or bleak--about her parents’ lives, her personal history.  I am moved by the intimacy of these poems. --DAVID TRINIDAD, author of Plasticville and The Late Show