Excerpt from the conversation with one poet of Trés Chicas….

Renée: As I listen to you now, there is a way that the spaciousness corroborates your intent.  With all this white space, there is room for something else to enter.

As I move through your book, I might experience two images, then I walk into a fragment, then an image of a seaside scene.  I turn the page, there is a tree and another fragment, “the tender places snap.”

Already two layers and never mind the poem that is echoing me.  I’m having an emotional response to all this and then, here is another poem.  A strong feeling of possibility envelopes me because I am invited in so many different ways to experience the poems and everything that is echoing around the poems.

Piper:  This mobility is what I hoped to stimulate.

Renée:  Within all this layering, juxtaposition, and texture you present in your book, what is the thematic pulse of the book?

Piper:  What is born of loss – my mother’s death, my childhood moving from place to place, the child I did not have.

When I let intense longing sink in – truly feel the weight of absence – mystery visits in unexpected forms – sudden communities are built out of this mystery.  The unsettledness of absence can blossom into a new orientation to the world.  After such pain, the door is left open.