Dark Card

"Centered on the experience of raising a special child and the cruelty we inflict on difference, these poems will break and heal your heart, their rage, hope, insight and love carried by a poetic power as targeted as a bullet-train. . . . this is an extraordinary debut from a writer wise, brave, darkly witty and unrelentingly inventive, one with a story to tell and a voice to make it sing."--Barry Spacks, First Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara and Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medalist

"There's an allusion in these pages to Emily Dickinson's line about hope being the thing with feathers, and there is a lot of hope and determination in these fine poems about a mother's love for her autistic son. The poems travel from his birth through his pre-teen years, and the language is always precise, sometimes fierce . . . Dark Cardilluminates with its darkness."--Robert Phillips, Series Judge