armorless

Carol Lipszyc's openness is a balm. Looking outward, she appreciates the surrounding beauty - the "rust petticoat" of a maple tree and "the cool cap of air" from rustling leaves - and honors the ordinary, shutters half-closed at dusk and a utilitarian bucket "glazed in an alchemy of gold." Looking inward, she leans "in to listen" to birdsong and melody, digs for words in "memory's lost bin." Though "phantom fighters" and "zealots" pose a threat - as they will - the poems in Armorless prevail against darkness and despair. Lipszyc's is a vision of light and hope.

-Ruth Panofsky, author, Bring Them Forth (2022)

At the heart of this chapbook is the Covid pandemic that rendered each of us solitary and fearful and made us feel, as Lipszyc puts it, "armorless." Enduring the imposed isolation of the time, the author finds herself wishing that she "had the means to / embrace possibility again / to succumb once more to the lure / of light in the world." Her poems reveal that she never did stop being entranced by the light, her senses attuned to what surrounds her. And in the absence of others, she brings to life characters in old photographs such as children somersaulting in a Long Island field or a jazz musician playing the trombone in New Orleans in 1958: characters whose vitality is a testament to hope.

-Susan Glickman, author, Artful Flight: Essays and Reviews 1985-2019 (2022)

Carol Lipszyc's poems deftly project this uncanny quality - that the fuel for continuing is something small and available to us all. The short, metrical lines in the penultimate "Turning Points" are an act of faith: "ignite the ordinary / and the flicker of a flame / can fan a bonfire / in the imaginative chain." Our survival equipment should be portable, a record of everyday experience to face thoughtfully, as we watch songbirds flying in "heart flutter strokes." The opening poem lovingly, forcefully funnels readers down to where they need to go: "Perhaps the isolate earth waits only / for a seedling place, ample and protected / and a kneeling shadow whose hands till beauty." Big-hearted, attentive, and charming, Lipszyc offers poems that stand with us in solidarity when we shelter in place.

-Thomas Friedrich, author, Entertaining Writing on Everyday Topics (2020)