Description:
How to Cross the Desert is author Kate Lassman's response in poetry to the questions and epiphanies provoked by 17 days in the deserts of Utah and Colorado during two annular eclipses.
Brief description: Kate Lassman is a poet, college writing tutor, and aspiring mystery novelist. She grew up in a suburb of Denver, Colorado that at the time was called Englewood, but has since been renamed Centennial. She holds a bachelor's degree in English and Biology from Grove City College and an MFA in poetry from George Mason University. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines and in the anthology Pax: An Anthology of Southern Maryland Poetry, published by The Wineberry Press in 2019. Her first book, Dawn Anyway, was published by New Bay Books in 2022. She is a member of the Maryland Writers' Association and the Poets and Pies Poetry Circle. She is married to historian and park ranger David Lassman. Together they love traveling, visiting antique malls and used book stores, and playing Scrabble. After moving to Maryland, they adopted rescue cats Joy, Grace, and Zany, thereby happily becoming the neighborhood's crazy cat people.
Review Quotes:
"Bring with you yourself" is just one of the
many softly spoken lines in Kate Lassman's
new chapbook, How to Cross the Desert. It
cannot be closer to the truth because Kate
offers a perfect combination of silence, touch
and wisdom while the reader walks through
the desert with her poems.
-Rachel Smith, Poet and Professor, College of Southern Maryland
In How to Cross the Desert, Kate Lassman
shares her physical and spiritual journey
through the Utah Canyonlands. In the poem
"Geologist," she asks,
"Can any words, made
of only breath and ink, capture the inscape of
the mountains?" I invite you to read each
poem slowly to find the answer. Put vourself
in her hiking boots as she makes her way. You
will discover, as she does in
"Gemstones," "a poem is a mountain pebble that can start
an avalanche."
-George Miller, Writer and Publisher, Millstone Publishing and Wineberry Press