Tilted Equilibrium by Kate Marshal Flaherty pubished by Hidden Brook Press

The poems in Tilted Equilibrium will knock you off kilter, pitch you over the handlebars and into the mud, tickled by dazzle, splashed in the loblolly of language, word-spiced by varieties of experience as you move fromirlhood, through adolescent awakening, to childbirth, motherhood, and on into the bitter-sweet triumphs and disappointments of adulthood. As you read, you might weep a tear of sorrow, a tear of joy, a tear to bless us all as we are caught up in the beautiful salt-washed benedictions of the human predicament. As Kate Marshall Flaharty writes by way of a self-embrace in the closing lines of her coda: Oh teardrop, / become a benedition: / may your purging water / mist up clestial; / your bright white dust be / left like manna, / powderfine blessing of salt. John B. Lee, Poet Laureate of Brantford

Kate Marshall Flaherty has skillfully sewn her poetic homilies into a circular quilt of slanted perceptions that illuminate realities as wistful as dandelion seeds and as magnificent as grief. The light falls on every well chosen word.
Linda Rogers, People's Poet 2000