Reliquary

"From the beach near St. Michael's I pocketed a stone, planning to teach it to speak. I didn't expect it to blurt out "orca" or "metamorphic," but I knew stories were buried somewhere inside." --Teaching a Stone, Reliquary

"In Reliquary, Jan Lee Ande has created a steady, contemplative, and sometime playful voice, often melding perfectly the factual and the fanciful, the hallowed and the sensual. These poems bring new perspectives to the commonplace--a stone, an avocado, a sea urchin--as well as celebration to the mysteries of human experience and the cosmos. Many lines, many images, many cadences of Jan Lee Ande's poems will remain alive with the reader long after this book is closed." --Pattiann Rogers , "Reliquary strikes me as a remarkable collection, a tonic for mind and spirit. Jan Lee Ande's poems drench this familiar earth with fresh and penetrating light. They wake us up to the fact that we're alive." --X.J. Kennedy, "If the world were to come to an end and begin again it might be a small stone with a mouth. Then it would be trees: 'sequoia, redwood, banyan.' Jan Lee Ande creates a new world in Reliquary, 'the words thick as leafbuds on your tongue, ' In 'Sitting Under the Bo Tree' she sees herself as 'another person...of another mind, ' and is seized by 'a kind of rapturous delight.' Things say to her, 'I am that, I too am that.' She speaks of the unseen, 'quarks with strangeness and charm, ' but like the Indian in one of her poems she also thinks with the heart. I do not know a more moving poem than Ande's about 'a tiny pink thing / no bigger than my thumbnail, like an itty bitty rat / bus she was a daughter.' It has been said that 'writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.' Ande says, 'Still, somewhere inside, the voices keep whispering / the ordinary prayers of this human soul.' Elizabeth Bishop would have loved these poems. So would William Blake." --Louis Simpson, Series Judge

JAN LEE ANDE's first book, Instructions for Walking on Water, won the 2000 Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems appear in New Letters, Image, Nimrod, Notre Dame Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry International and the anthologies Place of Passage (Story Line Press) and Jubilation (Beat Books). She teaches poetry, poetics, and history of religions at Union Institute & University. Ande is from the Pacific Northwest.