LaDeana Mullinix is a native Kansan, now living in northwest Arkansas. She is a graduate of the University of Kansas and Texas Woman's University. She is a Quaker, a retired occupational therapist, a Master Gardener, and a Master Naturalist. She has written poetry since junior high, but has only recently begun publishing her work. Each poem in LaDeana Mullinix's Small Comforts holds a story and a surprise. Like a magician, she leads you in one direction, then presto!-you land somewhere else. But there's so much more to her than playfulness. She's an original, a pure voice that speaks to us gently, her humor softening the edges of grief she knows well from her work as an occupational therapist and a friend to the elderly. She waves her wand of words over prairies, neighbors, horses, ducks, social causes . . . and scapula. Is she speaking about her own poetry in "Sailing the Great Plains" when she describes a team of Clydesdales "whose feathery fetlocks tricked many / to think their light steps were not powerful"? Read Small Comforts and decide for yourself. -Suzanne Underwood Rhodes, Arkansas Poet Laureate and author of The Perfume of PainLaDeana Mullinix's Quaker sensibilities were tempered by an upbringing on the Kansas prairie. Together, those two influences further shaped her sensibilities as a poet. Through her eyes, we see a world of challenge that she faces with uncompromising openness and clarity. It is a world of ice storms and lightning strikes, of loss and the incipient chill of autumn. But it is also a world of simple comforts that see us through it all: jonquils planted on the fresh grave of a pet dog, "fresh cinnamon rolls warmed," and a "white cotton sweater-light, but just enough." In this new collection, Mullinix offers us more than the simple comfort of lucid, well-written poems; she serves us lightning strikes of love to "lighten the weight of sadness if we can" and "allow joy to alight on a heavy world."-Michael Blanchard, author of The Pearl Diver's Daughter & Other Poems and editor of SLANT: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry
