This heartfelt collection of poems sprouting out of closets, camposantos, and keep-sake boxes, gifts us a past tangled with the present. Haiku, haibun, tankas, and persona poems, like wild rose bushes, pricking the senses with blossoms and thorns. Así es la vida. Así son estos poemas. In Counting the Ways we hear voices speaking, dialogues and utterances that refuse to be forgotten. Sometimes it's them. Sometimes it's us. Sometimes it's the poet ruminating through dreams, not afraid of waking. -Levi Romero, Inaugural New Mexico State Poet LaureateIntimate and conversational, the poems in Sharon Rhutasel Jones' new book Counting the Ways feel as warm and inviting as a shared meal. Rooted in the landscape of New Mexico, these poems are love songs to a place, to people and pets and wildlife, sometimes sprinkled with subtle humor, sometimes weighted with heartache, always with an alert eye on the world outside her door. The poems that make up sections of the book display the quality and agility of Rhutasel-Jones' attention and associations, and even the smallest contains a large space for wonder. -Rebecca Aronson, author, Anchor; Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom; and Creature, CreatureSharon Rhutasel Jones buzzes, bee-like, in and out of flowers at will, into a multitude of magic trunks where memories, laced to poignant mementoes, stay ever fresh and dazzling. She presents a compelling array of images that arrest, awaken, realign our senses and remind us of all that endures, or should endure. Love is the mother-lode fuel for these fleeting, inward journeys, the connecting rod to the often disparate, provocative pairing of images. William Blake, Ezra Pound, and without a doubt, Wallace Stevens, would buy this book. -Byron Lindsey, Professor, Emeritus, The University of New Mexico
