Still Life Stories

Author: Cristina M.R. Norcross

Publisher: Aldrich Press (2016)

“'I live inside layers of color,' Cristina Norcross confides in this moving collection, Still Life Stories. The title provides a double meaning—the speaker remains alive, as she contemplates the lives of others who have passed in these arresting still life images. Like the still life paintings of the 17th century Dutch Masters, Norcross’s poems bring us into a carefully examined world where death is understood as a new aspect of life. And living fully, is what Norcross is all about."

–Susan Rich

"With lush imagery and a tone of celebration, the poems in this collection explore our relationships: with art, with the natural world, with each other. Cristina Norcross has a gift for finding the beauty in all facets of human experience and rendering them with clarity and precision on the page. She reminds us to pay attention. She invites us to feel. Still Life Stories is eminently accessible and full of heart."

–Kim Suhr

"Norcross writes with the tenderness of one who knows that beauty is often born of darkness, and there are joys accessible only through sorrow. In Still Life Stories she offers readers small, polished jewels reclaimed from loved ones who have walked on: a horse remembering its rider; a climbing friend who fell; dances with a ghostly grandfather. Though gone, her loved ones still live. Still Life Stories also touches readers with the writer’s gentle counsel to herself: surrender; break open; feel everything; begin again. Still Life Stories is a small book of treasures."

–Leslee Goodman