Quick to Bolt is a collection of poems that celebrates the sense of mystery, wonder, and comfort that is integral to the natural world as well as relations with others. The poems capture those moments when the beauty in nature arrests us, and we must look or listen very closely. Simultaneously, many of the poems bring an awareness that this wonder is fleeting; hence the title, Quick to Bolt. When that awareness becomes embodied in our beings, how then do we keep wonder alive, and not grieve its passing? That is a central question the poems wrestle with, but do not fully answer.
Advance Praise for Quick to Bolt
“Precisely weighed and measured, Mary Fister’s highly accomplished poems are alive to tide and time, sounding depths of feeling. The inheritances of Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt are turned here to a vision all Fister’s own — a porous sensibility alert to each season dissolving into the next. Her poems in this singularly beautiful collection shine with quiet, well-earned authority and evoke what may be apprehended at “the outskirts of vision.”
—Lee Upton, author of The Day Every Day Is
“This poet is a natural: a gardener, a farmer, an ocean wanderer, a lover of horses, birds and flowers—yet her most natural gift resides in these poems, as sculptor of words. ‘An artist’s hand is raised’, she writes — then witnesses ‘the wild wild skirmishes of words’. These searching startling poems prove ‘what the chisel can be to the dream’ and here is both chisel and dream — then the lasting sculpture made whole.”
—Carol Muske-Dukes, former poet laureate of California, author of Blue Rose
“In Fister’s Quick to Bolt, nature is conduit and context, and both an emblem of and an equal partner in human intimacies. Lovers discover each other’s bodies among acres of ripe blueberries; husband and wife tend a Galahad delphinium’s strut; and a child reaches out to touch a mare, as her mother, from whose open palm the mare munches clover, kneels close. These sensuous, lyrical poems remind us that we are surrounded by mortal beauty—in the natural world and in the human heart—and call us to be dazzled, to cherish that beauty while we can.”
—Benjamin S. Grossberg, author of Connecticut Book Award winner, My Husband Would
About the Poet
Mary Fister teaches writing and literature at the University of Hartford and has for over thirty years. Her family has roots in Vermont that go all the way back to the DAR, but she was born in the Midwest when her Dad started his first job, so she will forever be a “flatlander.” She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, The Massachusetts Review, Tar River Poetry, and Volt among many others. Her chapbook, Provenance of the Lost was published by Finishing Line Press. She lives in Northampton, Massachusetts with her beloved kitties BooDah, and Maibee, a bunny, Ella, and a horse, Milli.
SPECS
Quick to Bolt
Poetry
Price: $15.95
Page Count: 88 pages
Format: Softcover
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 979-8-9865324-2-4
Publication Date: April 4, 2023
Distributor: IPG / Chicago
Rights sold: All rights available.
Rights & Publicity contact: Dede Cummings
dede@greenwriterspress.com
LINK TO PRE-ORDER AT THE AUTHOR’S LOCAL, INDIE BOOKSTORE:
https://www.broadsidebooks.com/book/9798986532424
Distributor: IPG; also available through Ingram, Follett/Baker & Taylor, and other wholesalers.
Individuals can pre-order directly from Bookshop.org, Indiebound.org, online, or contact your local, independent bookstore.
Booksellers, libraries, colleges/universities, gift shops, etc., can order directly through IPG:
Independent Publishers Group
814 N. Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60610
Order Placement: (800) 888-4741
Via email: orders@ipgbook.com
For an advance reader’s copy—digital or print—email dede@greenwriterspress.com