Mortal Beings - by Cynthia Trenshaw (Paperback)

Review Quotes

These poems speak of dying friends, lost opportunities, the grim exhalation that is a last breath. But over the course of the book, we cycle back to realizing the wonderful gift that is each breath, that is the movement between darkness and light. It's a memorable book.

Tod Marshall, WA State Poet Laureate, 2016-2018

A mystic for modern times, Cynthia Trenshaw offers us poems, unflinching and tender, that evoke the liminal spaces between life and death, seen and ignored, spoken and unspoken. Deeply observant and keenly felt, these poems confide that in the same moment, one can dwell in both contentment and sorrow.

Kristin Brace, winner of the 2018 Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize (Emerging)

Cynthia Trenshaw is a poet rejoicing in the uniqueness of the ordinary. In this volume, her gritty melodies communicate the richness of birth and death, transience and permanence, and, finally, profound and loving acceptance. Readers are always deeply enriched by the clarity of Trenshaw's visions. She writes with what I consider a hallmark of great poetry: the ending that focuses, refocuses, awakens, and invites.

Rabbi Ted Falcon, PhD, author of Finding Peace Through Spiritual Practice; Seattle-based

spiritual therapist, teacher, author, and rabbi of the Interfaith Amigos

Cynthia's poems are like listening to jazz whose modulations reach surprising corners of language and a wide sweep of experience that will have you looking forward to the next territory she courageously enters to use her craft. You will not be bored, rather lifted into a kaleidoscope of lyrical experience that you will recognize as deeply human with a great heart for the times in which we live.

Judith Adams, author of I Wanna Die Nice and Easy, Love Letters Only, and Crossing the

Line; a state-wide speaker for Humanities Washington, 2017-2020