Precipitates

Employing some of the link-and-shift techniques of the Japanese renku, the poems in Precipitates repeatedly allude to major themes in Ecclesiastes, while speaking, under the influence of the Buddhist “Heart Sutra,” to the hunger for perfection, to embrace change and find release from attachment. Weather serves as a metaphor for our headlong fall into aging and death. "With the precision of the minute hand and the broad, generous sweep of the hour, the poems in Precipitates are the result of a skilled and patient practitioner. Debra Kang Dean centers her mind and heart at the point where 'lines/intersect: then, now, and then...', distillations from living fully present to the moment deposited as 'some new thing.../in the fragile nets we weave.' Dean weaves quiet magic, fine poems. - Cathy Song "In a waka on impermanence, Zen master Dogen wrote, 'The world? Moonlit/Drops shaken/From the crane's bill.' The precipitates in these poems - snow, hail, rain - join what takes form, the patch