{"title":"Andrea Potos","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"her-joy-becomes-paperback","title":"Her Joy Becomes - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAndrea Potos's poems are permeated by an expansive sense of kinship. Blood family are precious, but equally intimate are luminary writers with whom she finds soul connections. Although most of these figures are physically absent, all are a vital presence in Potos's \"rooms of thought.\" She recommends (and practices) not getting snagged in appearances but \"look[ing] slant\" to find what is enduring. This is what she calls \"graz[ing] with your consciousness\" to gather joy. This is no simplistic pursuit. Rather, she's in agreement with C.S. Lewis's insight that \"joy is the serious business of heaven.\" Potos understands that it takes committed work to choose and own joy. These poems involve aging parents, cancer, dread, death, grief, funerals-the hard times that generate hard questions. But they also celebrate the sustaining \"underpinnings of dailiness\"-laundry, coffee, washing dishes, brushing hair, bird song, vegetables, floral dresses. As those who are now absent become valued mental companions, she discovers \"a peace whisper[ing] to her...a different happiness unfolding.\" The gift of these poems is in how Potos thoughtfully weighs what is given and what is taken, how life both fulfills and disappoints, and determines to let joy keep her. \"Breathing deeply is simple, and hope is the natural choice.\" \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378358354143,"sku":"9781594980244","price":19.44,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/pC2vEKv0V49781594980244.webp?v=1789254488"},{"product_id":"the-presence-of-one-word-poems-paperback","title":"The Presence of One Word: Poems - Paperback","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCenturies ago a poet was defined as a singer. Why do we love song? Probably because it so often lifts and opens the heart... and because it can speak that for which the heart has no words. \u003cem\u003eThe Presence of One Word\u003c\/em\u003e does all of this. Andrea Potos's poems capture with graceful insight her wide breadth of belonging, her treasured ties to family and loved friends, to great masters of various arts, to landscapes that shimmer and invite, to small and large details of the everyday as well as the momentous. She belongs because she beholds. To her, these people, places, and observations are vastly more than their literal dimensions-they are genuinely luminous. \"It seems I am forever \/ looking for the thin \/ place, wishing to glimpse \/ inside a moment, close enough \/ to stand sentry to the invisible.\" Potos does indeed discern the invisible and shares it with us in poem after poem. In making Greek meatballs, she notes that it's not only appetites that \"widen with anticipation\"-so do spirits \"and every holy sense.\" Girlhood swims are both play and exploring \"the surface between air and water, [a] ... threshold between worlds.\" And in elegant Viennese coffeehouses where time seems to stop, she imbibes more than the delectable beverages, finding in this atmosphere that \"grandeur \/ seeps into your once stagnant thought \/ you have placed yourself in the dignity \/ of... what goes on and on and on.\" It's all in her capacity for deeper vision: \"...this is not about the eye \/ but the heart, and its gates.\" We come away refreshed by these heart-views, feeling \"she is the one, \/ containing multitudes. \/ ...with pure light overflowing \/ through every expansive room.\" And we find ourselves agreeing with this wise assessment: \"Eternity \/ the woman said of my poems.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51378516295903,"sku":"9781594981739","price":20.52,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0813\/8958\/4607\/files\/VhR6PRhg5j9781594981739.webp?v=1789257953"}],"url":"https:\/\/blackandbarhe.com\/collections\/andrea-potos.oembed","provider":"Black \u0026 Barhe Bookstore","version":"1.0","type":"link"}