Susan Blackwell Ramsey

Nature’s Olympics

Arts & Literature

“In Nature’s Olympics, the lyric and the narrative, experience and observation dance with one another, change partners, recombine. A gravesite, a canoe in a storm, a luncheon unroll as if in real time; a few pages later, in stunning haikus, Heller distills a sickle moon, some finches, a doe to their sharpest lyrical moment, to the purely present. . . . In Nature’s Olympics, Janet Ruth Heller claims her poetic place at the intersection of memory and the vivid now.”