Reviews

Notice what art at its best can do: shape memories so vividly that the reader can visit them, touch the landscape, speak to dead relatives. In Under an Adirondack Moon, C. Ann Kodra offers us an aerial and close-up view of the Adirondack terrain and of her people who lived, worked, built houses, tilled the land, grieved and exulted. Now her people are ours, too. Community and connectedness reign in this opus, and so does freedom of spirit: "Imagine the walls lifting in your lifetime." The poet helps the reader to feel the weightlessness, the liberation, that well-crafted imagination can create for us. Kodra's poems are a place we can inhabit with more breathing room than our busy lives usually permit.--Marilyn Kallet,
The Love That Moves Me
Many of us "Baby-Boom" poets have written about the loss of parents and old ones, and our memories of the lives, stories, farms and small towns of childhood. It is dangerous territory for the writer, not only for the dark muddy well it can stir inside, but also for the trap of sentimentality and cliche that lies within easy reach. Cathy Kodra manages to avoid all the traps in Under an Adirondack Moon, a poetic memoir of her family and an unflinching, complex portrait of her father. "I don't know if this is sorrow or joy, / finding myself in the house where everything / has vanished," she writes, as she gifts both to us over and over in this book, the best debut collection I've read in many years.--Rita Sims Quillen,
The Mad Farmer's Wife
These poems rise like blossoms from an heirloom garden, filling the senses with voices, textures, and omens that delight, entertain and edify as they gently open the reader to a world that still glistens, under an Adirondack Moon.--Don Williams,
writer, founder of New Millennium Writings