The Heart of It

The poems in Alan Perry's collection, The Heart of It, offer us far more than the sonic pleasures of stirring poetry - though they do swell with astounding music, too. These poems, each like a cut diamond, emanate a hard-won wisdom that dwells in the "liminal spaces" between moments, when Perry knows we are most present. His wide-ranging vision moves from exoplanets to the ordinary magic of watching a washing machine "pulsing dirt out of clothes." This is a book to read and cherish over and over, until you have absorbed its most potent lesson: how to widen your eyes to this world we live in, and all the possible worlds beyond.

-James Crews, author, Unlocking the Heart and Turning Toward Grief

Throughout The Heart of It, time transforms creatures and the environment. A caterpillar spared by a human will become a moth while a crumbling walkway no longer serves as a path. Alan Perry closes the gap between the seemingly ordinary and the extraordinary by giving equal attention to laundry and the discovery of a new star, to a scribbled note from a spouse and a love poem hidden beneath an airplane seat cushion. This collection meditates on absence and mortality, but it doesn't dwell in despair. Love is the act of being present, and these poems invite us to be present for transformative particulars of joy and loss.

-Diane LeBlanc, author, The Feast Delayed

In his searching and poignant second chapbook, poet Alan Perry explores the inner and outer spaces of love. In The Heart of It, as he writes in "Voyager," is the distant hope of love on some "rock in deep space," to find someone "to breathe its thin atmosphere with me." The poems are varied and far-ranging, as in "Cycles," which begins with a washing machine, then makes you notice how sheets "wrap themselves around everything / like legs tangled in bed." Like the poem by the same name, this collection is truly a "Tapestry" of love in all its pieces, "suspended like an intricate rug / that mixes each scrap of language." As Perry reminds us, love can arrive unexpectedly, as in "Side Door," and all you need to do is step through the door and stay.

-Gene Twaronite, author, The Museum of Unwearable Shoes and Death at the Mall