Amy Meckler welcomes you

"What a steady heart we encounter in this new young poet's first book-a thinking heart that wishes for 'time enough to say everything to the living,' and tries to do just that.  With intelligence, humor, and a deeply empathic imagination, What All the Sleeping Is For looks out at the world and into the heart, and continues stitching its vision."

- Donna Masini

 

"Amy Meckler's What All the Sleeping Is For is a wake-up call.  Reading these poems we begin to believe, again, in a world that can be transformed by our scrupulous, tender attention to it, and by our commitment to finding a language that embraces both contemplation and action.  In this sense, these tender, thoughtful, exquisite lyrics are deeply political.  The publication of this important first  book is occasion for celebration."

- Jan Heller Levi

 

"Sleeping, as the author reminds us, can be the phase before things come back to life, a pause between seasons, rebirth, renewal. It can be the incubating medium for reviewing the unexpected and poignant life-shaping occurrences of a young girl growing up, and a god sleeping through the unfathomable tragedies. And it is, of course, for dreaming.

In all this Amy Meckler is wide awake, having fought for her awareness with determination and compassion. Beginning with the apparently stillborn Thomas Hardy?later awakened to life?and ending with the promise of a contemporary life delayed in childbirth, the poems in between bear witness to the longings and challenges of all of us confronting our ghosts and angels, loves and losses. These fresh poems stretch and cry with each reading."

- Allan Peterson