Cynthia Linville‘s The Lost Thing finds love all over again, time after time, and in everything from sea-breezes to those nights when "the sharp stars/ sting/ like grit in my eye." When I read her work I’m reminded of Mark Twain’s voice of Joan of Arc when Joan is asked if she is in a state of grace. She says: "If I am in a state of grace, I pray God keep me there and if I am not in a state of grace I pray God place me there." Linville resides in a state of grace, stays there and invites us into that state to share it in a lovely poetry she crafts with a sure voice and a total command of her medium. Read this book.

Cynthia Linville’s new book, The Lost Thing, is an eloquent testimony to love, mostly love lost but also an unquenchable affirmation of life. The honesty with which she views life is manifest in these words: "even the sweetest of pilgrimage shatters/ under too much light." She is not afraid to expose the intensity of her varied life under this light. Nature is an integral part of many poems: the "forbidden plum," the bees at Joshua Tree National Park, or Duncan’s Landing that is a "briny repository of secrets." There is also the strangler vine that destroys her grandparents’ home. In her last poem, "I am Fortune’s ungraceful daughter," she asks that time be returned back to her. "Return it to me," she says, words that echo in the heart for many of us, and this book of poems is one to which you will want to return.