[01/15/25] Brachman, Jo: Prayers to a Small Stone

Cider Press Review, paperback

Publication Date: January 15, 2025

Publisher Marketing: "Jo Brachman's collection, Prayers to a Small Stone, is wonderfully titled, and its poems (to borrow description from the book's own varied pages) know no boundaries, no maps, no roads, no signposts, and talk in a dream tongue that bears no translation. What stands out here is that Brachman is a poet who understands that familiar modes of navigation are useful but not necessarily enough. She also understands that the psyche bears no translation because it exists beneath and beyond our language, and the poet must use what language we do have to intimate the deepest feelings, the buried imperatives that live beyond our control. What is remarkable is that Jo Brachman takes us with her as she assays the elements of her active self, elements so much like our own: love, death, mother, brother, jubilation, despair, breath, wonder and beyond. And we see into the mysterious yet familiar other who will not back away from anything that has to do with life—her life and the lives around her. Prayers, indeed. To a small stone? Yes. And this reader would add, prayer to something far more, and perhaps, except for the art of poetry, unsayable." —Frank X. Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous, The Poems of Renata Ferreira, and Night of a Thousand Blossoms "

Jo Brachman's poems in Prayers to a Small Stone traverse the veil, whether it be through a woman metamorphosing into a doe, or the speaker communing with the dead or conjuring the ancient past. There's mystery and mysticism woven throughout Brachman's work as she explores ways to reconcile the specters of both the past and the future with the present self, demonstrating that there is wisdom in not-knowing. The poems are powerful and deft, and her debut collection shows a poet who is already more than accomplished. This book with its prayer-poems will linger, will leave you as Brachman writes in ‛Up Moons Grove Road,' ‛edging into dream.'" —Katie Chaple, author of Pretty Little Rooms