Small Small Joys

Authentic and compelling, poet Shubh Schiesser's new collection, Small Small Joys, is a lovely invitation to the private garden of her personal experiences. The book opens with a series of sumptuous settings and natural "encounters." Widening in scope through three interesting sections, the poems move from Texas to Tokyo to India and back again in a journey through women's lives: celebrations, rituals, memories, family, and renewal. When "at last," the book closes with the "Garden within a Garden" of the final poems, Schiesser has assured readers of treasures of life, of love, of self.Anne McCrady, award-winning, internationally published poet, speaker, and author of poetry collections Along Greathouse Road, Letting Myself In, and Under a Blameless Moon. There is, at the heart of Shubh Schiesser's Small Small Joys, an immersive open-hearted welcome of the wonder and travail of the world. Perhaps best characterized in "Spellbound" "I stand beneath the canopy mystified/and stretch both arms,"hers is a poetry that captures joys and pains and outrage, fully empowered, ever transfixed. She asks, "Why is wind knotted in my lungs?" even as she patiently, expertly, combs it out.-Jim LaVilla-Havelin, Author of Tales from the Breakaway Republic and West - Poems of Places