"An avian ode that migrates and mitigates through a lifetime of experiences. It is a moving tribute to a life well-lived, all its hopes and heartache. The careful observation and attention of our winged neighbors provides a thought-provoking metaphor for the cycle of life giving the reader a personal bird's-eye view from the poet's perspective."
—TAK Erzinger, poet winner of the University of Indianapolis 2021Whirling Prize
“This investigation of beauty and truth revels in ambiguity with emotions rendered as delicately as falling snow.”
—Carol Lynne Knight, author of Quantum Entanglement
“This is a travelogue by someone who can see and feel. And the haiku are wonderful!”
—David Budbill, author of Happy Life
The Kingdom Where Everybody Sings Off Key
“Remarkable, really, the way Helen Ruggieri moves from her life's early music when she was a teen angel with a Jersey Girl's desires; it was always 1955 with Little Richard & Elvis & doo-wop ? to, for example, the mature & spiritual reconciliations with the past that we hear in her penultimate poem in which she realizes "the larger rhythms rocking us" & embraces/makes a part of her being that "crepuscular kingdom / where no one keeps time." Yearning & yearning for the past subside, & the poet stands whole, in an off-key but deeply human twilight of poetry & deep understanding. This is a hard-earned, wonderful book.”
—William Heyen, author of Shoah Train
Camping in the Galaxy
“This collection gives a strong sense of the land that was, the land that is, and the land that could be. It explores myth and science, overlapping one with the other, using each to illuminate the other. It is definitely a book for the twenty-first century, where the sheer romantic immersion in nature no longer seems realistic to us, although we long for it still.”
—Janet McCann, Mom Egg Review
“Ruggieri’s work is immediate, sensual and direct.. not the place to go looking for a warm and fuzzy interpretation of nature. These pieces are mythic, natural, personal, and scientific all at once. Some are short essays and some are haibun, but they provide an unusual sense of place and interpretation of what it is like to be observer and participant in the world.”
—Walt McLaughlin, Woodthrush Books
The Kingdom Where No One Keeps Time
“This book is about loss parents, lovers, friends, pets, all those whose absence is felt strongly. Loss is approached through myth, through despair, through sensory detail like the empty hollow in the bed, or from the viewpoint of the shoes abandoned in the closet.”
—Good Times
