A Scythe of Moon

The title poem of June Blumenson's beautiful new collection, A Scythe of Moon, concludes that to live a long life is to be inhabited by people we love. These are rich poems filled with the aroma of life and a desire to transform bitterness into sweetness-a fond wish, but nevertheless, one that she accomplishes with just the right words and a bit of alchemy. Perhaps it is the sensibility of her belle-m re that allows memory to be unlocked in such a Proustian fashion, but Blumenson is wonderfully attentive to all sensory details that repair our lost worlds.

-Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota Poet Laureate Carrying Water to the Field

"At seventeen," June Blumenson writes in A Scythe of Moon, "I was blue-sky, don't look back, fly me to the moon" and that sauciness, that turbulence, that sensitivity pervades the poems in her book. Themes are Blumenson's loves and concerns--immigration, reconciliations, physical losses, earth's beauty--the world spins around her, but her love, mature voice and hopefulness stay fast. "How do I love you? Let me count / the wars we've lived through." I heartily recommend this carefully crafted book and shout YES when she sings, "No one can take from me what I have danced."

--Sharon Chmielarz, The J Horoscope: Poems

In A Scythe of Moon, June Blumenson has crafted imagery unthought of by other poets--including the seldom evoked sense of smell, as in"The Scent of a Man." "The Night We Ate the Javelina" and "Relics" invite us into the privacy of loss and grief. We know and feel the absence to come. Poems of finding her place in family, such as "Sisters' Reunion," give pause to reflect upon our own. "Stuff of Wounds" makes the mouth do its work, as Galway Kinnell said a poem should. You will want to read several poems out loud in a room that amplifies their sound back to you.

--Chet Corey, Poet & Writer