Description:
Shoreline Devotional contains motifs of sun, earth, and unbridled nature in poems about growing up and living in Southeast Texas; poems about vulnerable female bodies, decades of accumulated grief after deaths and hurricanes and pandemics, and the conflicts at the base of human existence and experience -- the longing for religion and also its insufficiencies, the "seasoned hymn of the gulf" crashing upon its littered and polluted beaches, greed next to love, paradise next to hell, and the miracles of music alongside the enshrined skulls of ancestors.
Review Quotes:
"Casey L. Ford 'breathes and fingerpaints her (poems) in the mist' of the Texas shoreline... This collection is a mosaic of loss, love, grief, and prayers of examen... These poems will draw your thoughts to the ineffable..." --Susan Delaney Spear, author of Beyond All Bearing and On Earth...
"Keats tells us 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty, ' but is that really so? ... Ford offers lyrical poems that are at once gorgeous and gritty... The speaker... reveals a place and a person 'kinetic with hope, honest, the real image.'" --Katherine Hoerth, author of Goddess Wears Cowboy Boots and Flare Stacks in Full Bloom
"When a poet's first book contains one poem that knocks me out, I know that's a talent to watch in the future. But in Shoreline Devotional, Casey L. Ford delivers so many knockout punches... devoted to truth, clarity, and light." --Julie Kane, author of Mothers of Ireland and Naked Ladies: New and Selected Poems
"Throughout this very fine collection, Casey L. Ford captures the feeling and of our time--a modern hell... But everywhere within the reality of a world unraveling... lies a vibrant spirit and a powerful, beating heart... Casey Ford's poems sing out." --Karen Osborn, author of Patchwork and Centerville