
Sky Over explores a sister’s ache over the loss of her older brother with a love that transcends their relationship troubled by growing up with an abusive mother. These poems were inspired by Patricia Fargnoli’s poem about clouds and the ephemeral nature of life, “Winter Sky Over Cheshire County, New Hampshire.” Sky Over’s twenty-one songs of grief travel back and forth through time as the regretful sister, who is addressing her long-gone brother and the ways they navigated their complicated circumstances, discovers exquisite hues of love and forgiveness that persist beyond the provinces of life and death. In the twenty-second and final poem, her brother speaks to her from death’s eternal now.

With words that reach out like wings, Lana Hechtman Ayers’s new book, Sky Over, will lift and carry you. This brave and loving book reaches across the boundaries, not just of history, regret, and silence but of time and space, life and death. Through these vivid poems to her late brother, Alan, and through one beautiful and poignant message spoken in Alan’s voice, Ayers powerfully proves that we may “love each other alive.” This book will hearten you, for in these deftly woven poems, she brings us close to our longed-for horizons. Here we find renewed connection, forgiveness, and the chance to love again.
—Annie Lighthart, author of Pax

