Are We There Yet?

Reading Ellen Goldsmith is like looking through a pair of strikingly clear and unsmudged glasses. The poems in Are We There Yet? are sharply focused and full of wonder. Like a Zen rabbi she conveys both mystery and wit, using a light touch, achieving great beauty in brevity. The poems are agile, adept at leaping. This poet trusts her reader and trusts the poem, making magic by what she doesn't say, doesn't need to say. Again and again, the poems surprise with unexpected and utterly apt turns, moments of recognition. Goldsmith is at home with paradox and unafraid of darker moments. We move with this impressive book through intimations and uncertainties to the grounded world of our current moment with its heartbreak and its call to a deeper cherishing.

-Betsy Sholl, House of Sparrows

This collection speaks with quiet wondering about life's uncertainties and listens with a respect for those moments that lure us toward love's unexpected yield. The poems invite us to gaze upon ordinary things and find that "Waiting / isn't a room. It's the whole house." Poem after poem calls us to join the poet on the unsettling journey through illness and anguish, only to stumble upon the difficult discoveries that find us when we've lost our way.

They gesture with an inner spaciousness of seeing, reminding us to cherish what we still have as an abundance generous enough to include our losses. They lure us, gently but persistently, toward that unseeable flow that carries us beyond language into wiser silences.

-Mark S. Burrows, You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke

Are We There Yet? skillfully observes the wider world while simultaneously exploring the self. Through lyrical meditations and interrogations of memory, Goldsmith creates a mosaic of one growing wiser as she negotiates meandering paths of illness, aging, and mortality. Imbued with precise language and apt image-making, her collection quietly and painstakingly reveals the truth that "Life [is] a gift we wrap and unwrap."

-Mary Brancaccio, Fierce Geometry