All Those Windowed Rooms - by Cathy Allman (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

All Those Windowed Rooms sifts through memories whittling clarity from chaos. Poems catch fragments of a woman across decades and identities, looking for herself between the past and what she couldn't or didn't see coming. The collection is about perception-tension between views from inside looking out and from the outside looking in, the difference on either side of the glass. Whether conversational, confessional, or ekphrastic, these poems' introspections intersect with What once was morphing into What next? like crystal frozen on a window pane, which, in the right light, sparkles only to then dissolve in the sun, like time.

Review Quotes

Cathy Allman may be the bravest poet in America. That is no hyperbole. In her remarkable work she walks a tightrope over the daunting chasm between the mundane and the divine with inimitable grace and impeccable craft. And in All Those Windowed Rooms she pulls back the curtains to let us see into a home-and a life-where, poem by poem, all distinctions between the sacred and the profane fade into the same holy truth.

-Steven Lewis, The Lights Around the Shore (Codhill Press)

Cathy Allman in All Those Windowed Rooms demonstrates a keen and rare skill for metaphor. This collection takes the everyday and exposes the gossamer, linking this world with the mysterious one, the one hovering just outside our vision. Allman makes art from what most of us see as day-to-day living. These poems do what we want poems to do-lift us, connect us, show how jogging, having our hair cut, watching the final episode of a tv series, or running errands isn't just what we do, but how these moments are windows into what matters. Allman demonstrates a greater understanding, a seeking, and the book exposes the rich inner-life that often becomes buried under obligation, and that inner-life dances, exposing the depths of understanding and perception a reader craves, as the poet writes in "In the Time of Retrograde" "[...] Our vision / knows the future only from worried hindsight / and our mistakes. / It's not retrograde the way / shadow moves over the places we paved, / or above gulfs we found no means / to cross. In this light from far away, / we seem to unwind backward / as we reel ahead toward what is written."

-Katie Chaple, Pretty Little Rooms (Press 53)

Cathy Allman's All Those Windowed Rooms offers us lucky readers the opportunity to stop and glimpse the moments of a life lived well and fully as she examines how one maintains a sense of personal identity in this frail framework of being human given the many roles one must play-wife, mother, daughter, sister, and more. In All Those Windowed Rooms, Allman proves with every turn of the page that she is a keen observer of the emotional weather around her. She strikes a rare balance of writing both tenderly and unflinchingly about those persistent dualities of love and loss, youth and passing time, while always believing in the unwavering power of redemption, which she finds in life's sweetest, and darkest moments. These poems will leave you wanting to embrace the hardest hours of the past while running headlong into the unknowable future with poise and grace.

-TRAVIS DENTON, My Stunt Double (C & R Press)