Prayers to a Small Stone

Advance praise for Prayers to a Small Stone:"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 li