Bone Flute: A Woman Speaks

"Reading Bone Flute, we travel with the poet through the seasons of her life, moving through history, through memory, through geography, and yet with a powerful sense of immediacy. I feel certain that there are poems here . . . that will survive the way poems do, lodged like a tough plant in a crack in someone's heart."

-from the foreword by Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City

". . . Adler celebrates the small but profound joys that make any life a miracle in spite of suffering, 'black clouds fringed silver.'"

-Sally Ashton, author of Listening to Mars

"Irene's small and sacred meditations reveal what the owls, birds, and beetles already know: life's 'wild velocity' lives in every 'quill, bone, and feather.'"

-Robin Ekiss, author of The Mansion of Happiness

"Bone Flute is a wise testament to the pain and wonder of being human."

-Peter Kline, author of Mirrorforms

"An overarching goal was to represent Irene's mastery as well as her boundless curiosity. Irene was a master of lyricism, rhetoric, and form. Inspired by Bishop and Dickinson, her poems covered the ephemera of life, the rewards of attention, the wonders and sorrows of being alive."

-from the afterword by Angela Narciso Torres, editor of Bone Flute and author of What Happens Is Neither