The poems of Rooted and Winged explore the emotional and physical movement of flight and falling. They are of the earth, the place of fertile origins, and of the dream world we observe and imagine when we look upward. Golems and ghosts that emerge from the ground, as well as the birds and angels that live above us, inhabit the collection. We will always be striving for flight, even as we feel most comfortable closest to the earth.
“The poems of Luanne Castle’s Rooted and Winged are embedded in land and weather. ‘Bluegills snap up larvae in slivers of illusory light,‘ she writes early in the collection, hinting at the sensibilities of the companionable speaker who will usher us through the book. She sees. She is open to the world out there… How rare it is, to discover a writer who notices that ‘Grandma used to stand under the bulb over the sink that haloed her and pearlized the onions she chopped,‘ who can bring language to this: ‘When the last star falls to the others, / it darkens like the hush in a theatre, / a twinkling or two from silence.‘ There is no arrogance in this book, but there is power.”—Diane Seuss, Pulitzer Prize winning author, author of frank: sonnets, Four-Legged Girl, and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl
