Staring Through My Eyes

Author: Sylvia Cavanaugh  

Publisher: Finishing Line Press (2016)

Staring Through My Eyes is a collection of poems written by an introvert who has a keen and quiet awareness of her surroundings; from the mountainous geography of Pennsylvania, to the urban Mid-West, to the ever evolving landscapes of culture and gender. A kaleidoscope of personal and cultural observation; enjoy these poems "straight down the spine of afternoon."

"Filled with the 'honeysuckle summer,' and 'fairy hollows,' with 'b-boys. . . dizzy headspins,' and the 'staccato whap of screen doors,' these poems spell the closeness of other bodies, other identities. Sylvia Cavanaugh has written a collection of love poems—poems in love with the many rhythms of body, with the countless ways we story our humanness, and with the particularities of spaces from rural Appalachia to the urban Midwest. Her poetic vision awakens us to the complicated yin and yang of each person, the otherness nestled inside: the 'boy in me' I 'waited to love;' the 'men in dark work pants' who 'kneeled over their roses in the dusk.' Here explorations of memory transformed by the poetic line, become small wisdoms, become meaning. 'Gems of perception' and 'a kaleidoscope' of human searching, these are poems that say 'yes' to life. Read them 'straight down the spine of afternoon.'"

–Kimberly Blaeser