Centuries ago a poet was defined as a singer. Why do we love song? Probably because it so often lifts and opens the heart… and because it can speak that for which the heart has no words. The Presence of One Word does all of this. Andrea Potos’s poems capture with graceful insight her wide breadth of belonging, her treasured ties to family and loved friends, to great masters of various arts, to landscapes that shimmer and invite, to small and large details of the everyday as well as the momentous. She belongs because she beholds. To her, these people, places, and observations are vastly more than their literal dimensions-they are genuinely luminous. “It seems I am forever / looking for the thin / place, wishing to glimpse / inside a moment, close enough / to stand sentry to the invisible.”
Potos does indeed discern the invisible and shares it with us in poem after poem. In making Greek meatballs, she notes that it’s not only appetites that “widen with anticipation”-so do spirits “and every holy sense.” Girlhood swims are both play and exploring “the surface between air and water, [a] … threshold between worlds.” And in elegant Viennese coffeehouses where time seems to stop, she imbibes more than the delectable beverages, finding in this atmosphere that “grandeur / seeps into your once stagnant thought / you have placed yourself in the dignity / of… what goes on and on and on.” It’s all in her capacity for deeper vision: “…this is not about the eye / but the heart, and its gates.” We come away refreshed by these heart-views, feeling “she is the one, / containing multitudes. / …with pure light overflowing / through every expansive room.” And we find ourselves agreeing with this wise assessment: “Eternity / the woman said of my poems.”
In The Presence of One Word, we find poems powerful in their well-crafted expression of love-for her mother, grandmother, friends, places that moved her in Ireland or Greece or just her own or her grandmother’s house. Even empathy and compassion for a tiny spider. She writes many short, pithy poems that catch in the mind and shine there.
Marge Piercy, author of On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light and Sleeping with Cats
In her latest collection, The Presence of One Word, Andrea Potos invites us into a world of loving comfort. We willingly travel to these tender places, like the presence of her Yaya’s welcoming voice. These poems are infused with ancestral memory, a feast for the senses. Potos takes us to other worlds in her writing, whether it be through family connections, the wonder of nature’s majesty, or musings on past poets. For loved ones lost, Potos has a beautiful way of describing liminal spaces, “as if the sunrise / had found its home as she stepped through.” We are graced with awe and wonder in this gorgeous collection. With each poem, she is “tapping / from inside the egg / into an astounded world.” Potos reminds us to hold close “the deep cup of time in your palms.” Through these shared stories of belonging, we all belong.
Cristina M. R. Norcross, founding editor of Blue Heron Review, author of The Sound of a Collective Pulse
These are poems of wonder and reverence, tenderness and gratitude. Potos beautifully conjures the lives of family and friends and brings alive beloved literary predecessors, painters, and musicians. As we move through this collection, she beckons us to “kneel down in the deep, fragrant grasses, / make a bed for your body where the summer / is still singing your name.” Despite the losses we suffer, this book celebrates the pleasures of being alive in a world that still holds “some stray atoms” of the love and joy and genius of those who have gone before us, those who still light the way. It is a book of great gladness.
Marilyn Annucci, author of The Arrows That Choose Us
In Andrea Potos’s gentle collection of poems, she returns to familiar characters: Emily D., the Bronte sisters, her mother, and her yaya. Yet these poems are as new and as fresh as poems written for her recently lost friend, Rosemary. Readers will be taken to Ireland, Vienna, and Bronte’s moor. They’ll visit Lake Michigan, jacarandas in Los Angeles, and a “green” cemetery. All these poems are written with elegance and grace “as if the egg of Wonder was cracked open / and spilling its secret astonishments.”
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-2018 and author of Ripple, Scar, and Story
Andrea Potos
is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Two Emilys (Kelsay Books), Her Joy Becomes (Fernwood Press), and Marrow of Summer (Kelsay Books). She is the recipient of five Outstanding Achievement Awards in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association and the James Hearst Poetry Prize from the North American Review. Andrea lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and can be found online at andreapotos.com.