Crossing Over
Poems
University of New Mexico Press
Long’s work begs to be read aloud in order to savor the rich language and rhythm she instills in each poem. She explores the beauty of specific bridges while employing them as a metaphor for crossings to death (a sister’s suicide), eros, and art. Part elegy, the book also explores living, remembering, and celebrating.
No two people deal with loss in exactly the same way, which is one reason why Priscilla Long’s Crossing Over: Poems is so remarkable.…In writing out her grief over her sister’s suicide, her emotions universally resonate with the reader. Through interlocking themes and images, she articulates what it means to come to terms with the past in order to move forward into the future.
Priscilla Long curates the places of her heart—shows them to us and leaves them safe.…She upturns language from patriotic statements, and joins the ranks of Mary Oliver and Louise Glück as celebrators of local nature.
Long presents a collection of poems that explores deeper aspects of Pacific Northwest, interlacing elegies, including for her deceased sister, with our dreamy landscapes. She uses bridges as metaphors to evoke the world around us.
Memory is a bridge, poet Priscilla Long reminds us in this shimmering, elegantly structured collection: these poems lead back to the bright sources of longing and grief, guided by Long’s excellent and playful ear, passion for language, and spine-tingling insights. Crossing Over interlaces elegies—including a gorgeous series for a lost sister—with remembered love, human tragedy, dreamy sensation, moody northwestern landscapes, and bridges—real and metaphorical. The joy of creation leavens every poem. I have long anticipated this book: it was so worth the wait.
Priscilla Long would take a bridge anywhere to reach her lost sister, and these poems are replete with bridges literal and metaphoric. In her quest and resolve, these words resonate from ‘Kaddish for Susanne’: ‘All praise to all that is.’
The sounds of Priscilla Long's poems take their place in creation, so lush the vowels, so euphonious her rhymes, so full her catalogues, so keen her grief and boldness, so brave her confrontation of love and loss and death and the solace of crow and bone and language. This book begs to be read out loud, sings for its supper, and offers us comfort as a gift.'--Hilda Raz, Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Editor
This is a poet obsessed with bridges and crossings, as the title of the collection implies: chaos to order; grief to acceptance; solitude to connection; confusion to understanding; life to death; past to present; dark to light—themes as old as poetry.
Priscilla Long is the author of three books, including The Writer’s Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in the Southern Review, American Scholar, Smithsonian, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere.
