"Everything I do know comes from losing," Barbara DiMauro writes in her excellent collection of poems, Celestial Conversations. Wandering through the ruins of a life in which "all is broken beyond repair," DiMauro zooms in on telling details - a gold lamé bikini, fortune cookies - that somehow manage to sustain her. Sitting out at midnight under a late September sky or walking her dog by the ocean, she finds consolation, even joy, in the small moments. Grappling with loss and grief, these striking poems are about experiences a reader can identify with and are to be read again and again.

Robert Claps, author of Casting

Barbara DiMauro's second collection is plain-spoken, generous and confident. In a voice that's effortlessly lyrical, with a nod to Elizabethan cadence, she invites us to live with the seasons and a central optimism of cyclical renewal. There is intimate personification of the natural world as she speaks directly to a gathering storm. There is striking imagery and surprise, as well as tears that appear "like a sudden clap of thunder / on a cloudless day." There's wit, gentle self-mockery, and affection within an aura of sorrow and psychological musing. Like a gravely ill friend "who found light in the unlit corner of every room," these are poems of illumination, appreciation and consolation.

Lauri Robertson, author of In Concert and Après