This is an accessible must-read for all readers, from conventional poetic aficionados to those who wouldn't touch a rhyme scheme with a ten-foot pole. . . . Active verbs drip from the pages of this collection, treating the reader to expert English poetics. Allusions to canonical literature smile at the reader and second the expertise of the poet. Thompson-Slaughter reveals her proficiency with many styles of formal poetry, yet she shines most in her open-form pieces, through which honesty speaks loudest."

Sueann Wells

Author of Awake Before Dawn and

Midnight Summons

Editor of Mother Muse




"Denise Thompson-Slaughter's poems celebrate the sound and sense of those elements that form an authentic life, that make us both beast and believer, bound to this world and yet longing for the heavens. In Elemental, she puts her 'best ear forward/And what I hear...makes my heart...blaze in its dark cage', and we don't mind inhabiting that imagination, even when 'death arrives in a cloak as kind as silk/where we had expected sack cloth.' With careful attention to her perceived world, she gives us a 'focus of sounds...to comprehend this place/well enough to move through it/with some grace.'"

Charles Coté

Author of Flying for the Window