Faraway Rain
poems by
Lisa Zimmerman
~78 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: April 2027
The Advance Sale Discount price on this book is $8.50. For those who prefer to pay by check, the discount price is $12.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. Both advance sale prices will expire once the book is sent to press.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry collections include How the Garden Looks from Here (Violet Reed Haas Poetry Award) The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press) and Sainted (Main Street Rag). Her poetry and fiction have appeared in SWWIM Every Day, Apple Valley Review, One Art, Cave Wall, Poet Lore, Vox Populi, Ghost Parachute, and many other journals and anthologies. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, five times for the Pushcart Prize, and included in the 2020 Best Small Fictions anthology. She lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
On my evening ride I passed a dove, perched above my path on a wire, calling her evening vespers. I realized I heard that voice in this volume, in the writings of this poet—sounding in the prayer-song of a bird. Here is the soul in seclusion of its history, yet full—so full, overbrimming into the world, from fledgling to flight. Let these hymns, this life of Lisa Zimmerman play upon your heart. ~Sean Sexton, author of Portals
It is with delight and continuously refreshed startlement that I revisit the poems in Lisa Zimmerman’s Faraway Rain and marvel at how she entwines the image with interiority, the experiential with feeling, how her meaning-making in craft and voice sings anew with every rereading. To buy this book is to gain a companion for living, for life. “I write because of past cruelty, / and silence, and the dark, / dark eyes of horses.” ~Todd Dillard
How it Happens, Sometimes
Beyond the gate is the sweep of orchard grass,
tiny beetles creep down the stems like tears.
Beyond the sweep of orchard grass
is the weedy shore, squatting bullfrog
sounding a bass note three times his size.
Beyond the shore is deep green water
where brown carp maneuver, a swirl of mud,
sky above like a blue cup, overturned.
Beyond this mind is another mind
with its own lake and shore, its own
grass creased at the seams,
little puffs of bees among thistle
while out on the sheet of water a cormorant—
sleek black neck like the beginning
of a word—dives down, and down
and returns gleaming, like a sword.
One Way to Pray
When I first wake I try to remember to ask God to help me where I need it the most. Since I don’t know where I need it the most I let the kid inside me step forward. She couldn’t trust her own parents but horses brushed their large soft lips against the top of her shoulder and that made other love possible. There was the lift of breath to see an ocean of yellow tulips flow across a field in Holland, and the sturdy blue bike she could depend on to take her through damp woods to the village beyond the sad brick house in Belgium. It was an easy kilometer on a dirt path to the corner shop with its striped awning and the woman with black hair swept into a bun smiled as she handed her the cherry pastry in its crackly paper sack. How she sat on the warm earth to eat it, the sun a sift of gold smoke though tree branches, invisible songbirds whistling their jubilant praise above her head.
Young Mother Trying to Remember
the Image for the Poem She is Writing
Thin bar of light under the door,
one daughter singing in her bedroom —
she is holding, trying to hold or say,
to speak up, speak out, her arms full
of fresh sheets, the lost day cinched around
her waist, invisible effort put forward
and backwards into the dark hallway.
She is saved by her daughter’s voice —
half of the word or words scatter
and drop from her hands in her mind.
Stumble of meaning, ring of keys,
jingle of roses opening
in her girl’s song — little broken minutes before
and after the words’ luminous flare
inside the quiet far beyond
the day’s clean pages.
