Naomi Thiers

Made of Air Naomi Thiers

The poems in Made of Air argue for a deeper, more woman-centric definition of courage, a courage borne of the long haul. There are poems on the deaths of loved ones and mothering a teenager. One remarkable sonnet relates how a mother makes a U-turn off a ramp just before a bridge collapses in an earthquake. These poems celebrate the lives of women and girls and commemorate the daily ways they navigate through potential disaster-and come through dancing.

Kim Roberts, editor of By Broad Potomac's Shore: Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation's Capital and author of five poetry collections, including The Scientific Method

Naomi Thiers shows women and girls who hold things together. From the "cliff-high condo where we eat" to those sheltering in "a concrete pocket of unremarkable hidden things," her characters emerge, vulnerable as a flame in a dry season. Like Thiers' previous collections, her new work transfigures ordinary, "silenced people," as Tillie Olsen called them, "consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of maintaining human life." Can we bear to look at who we are now? Thiers' poetry says yes-and we must, to help each other hold together.

Rose Marie Berger, Senior Editor, Sojourners magazine and author of Bending the Arch: Poems

Naomi Thiers' Made of Air is a story of courage-or, more to the point, many such stories. It is a chronicle of endurance: the "ordinary women" in the book's first section endure homelessness, illness, abuse, the murder of their children, and in doing so, become extraordinary. Thiers' compassion and insight shine through in language that is vivid and luminous. The ending of her poem "Old People Waking" sums up the theme of the entire book: "And if everything hurts, it means / the current is flowing; we hiss inside: / Live. Live."

Miles David Moore, author of The Bears of Paris and founder of the IOTA Poetry Series