These poems remind us to wake up to whatever is happening in this imperfect world, to unexpected openings, especially to the unknown, “which is to say, everything.”
Slipstream was a finalist for the 2011 New Hampshire Literary Award for an Outstanding Book of Poetry.
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“The author’s world, like all of ours, is rife with uncertainty: the complexities of love, romantic and familial; the agony of aging parents and sometimes refractory children; the difficulty sometimes of merely showing up. And yet, Westberg uncannily provides us with a navigational map: her keen eye, big heart, and sure ear offer a kind of assurance.” — Sydney Lea
“At once tender and resolute, the poems in Slipstream work quietly to reconstruct a life—lovers, family, solitude—not to create a monument to the past but to find a place from which to step forward. She writes: ‘Forgive and forget? No, remember and let go.’ These poems offer both challenge and blessing to the work of that remembering.” — Cynthia Huntington
“Like Machado, Carol Westberg is drawn to metaphysics…. Her lean, attentive, and gracefully wrought lyrics look relentlessly for the other world that is in this one, but do so through a deep fidelity to emotive basics—most notably family history and the restorative power of nature—and through the lyric poem’s venerable desire to truthfully inhabit the moment.”— David Wojahn
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92 pages, $18.00