Bailing the River

Penelope Scambly Schott's imagination is too wonderful for words-but she finds the words and uses them like spears to pierce us, a feather to tickle us and a tissue for our grief. Every poem is a gem with a world inside and I don't know how she does it, but she does it. Bailing the River is some kind of magic.

-Alicia Ostriker, author of The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

Penelope Scambly Schott has long been one of my favorite writers. In this dazzling new collection, she's writing from the perspective of a wise woman who sees that "life gets clearer backwards." "Forget what you think you know," Schott tells us. Learn to look at the world with fresh eyes: "The April sky so busy with ducks." Feminist and feisty, Schott is "terribly busy / trying to set the world to rights." She's taking it all in, stuffing it in "the hot pink kleptomaniacal shopping bag" of her heart. Schott believes "we could save the world and all of its treasures/by bailing the river/into the bathtub drain," and although it's Sisyphean, I believe this, too.

-Barbara Crooker, author of Les Fauves

To say that Penelope Scambly Schott is a poet of the commonplace is to deprecate the commonplace-which, as these poems remind us, most of us do. Schott has that rare gift among poets, she cares about and respects her readers. One feels this as she invites us along, sharing hard-earned truths with the ease, grace, and precision of a skein of geese in flight. Don't let the subjects or the ease deceive you: this is no ordinary poet.

-Gary Miranda, author of Listeners at the Breathing Place