If you approach Patricia Scruggs' Forget the Moon like a collection of paintings, one sees how precise and true her lines are, how she applies details with a fine brush, how sometimes highlights make everything glow, and sometimes shadows threaten. These poems, composed with a clear-eye and open heart, grow deeper with each reading. She makes it look so easy, these poems drawn from daily life and memory. Reading this collection is like sitting at a kitchen table with a friend and sharing. The stories are exquisitely detailed, so they become our memories, beautiful, funny, and always at the mercy of shadows. -Elaine Mintzer, Natural Selections "Oh how sweet and sad life is, and the relish with which Patti Scruggs embraces that truth creates a glow of love around each and every poem in this book. Her craft is so deft that you hardly realize she is tilting at form as if they were windmills, and never gives up on the deeper wisdom of love and loss and the way snow melts and flowers come out of the ground. She seems to have such an intimate way with nature, not the cloying sentiment of the romantic poets, but a kind of urban nod to the passing of things, the precious resurrections of poetry. This book will live in your soul forever, and you can read it with a glass of milk in one hand and a stiff shot of whiskey in the other. Either way, Patti Scruggs will wake you up with every line of her magnificent poems." -Jack Grapes, THE NAKED EYE and ALL THE SAD ANGELS Scruggs' conversational style invites us into her poems and lulls us. . . by superimposing the real and the imagined, she creates a nostalgia suffused with the irony of hindsight. There is the childhood where Fate in the form of the Depression calls the shots, and the woman later with her own children. Delicate and precise, often witty, sometimes wry, Scruggs explores the universal longings behind each domestic façade. -Lorine Parks, CATALINA EDDY and PERSONS OF INTEREST
