Every Door Thrown Open

The agency of Barbara Ford's Every Door Thrown Open is one of fierce independence and spiky determinism. We walk through her 'private wild' that becomes ours through the art of attention: "On your tongue is / the taste of rabbit stew, Amish butter, / wild raspberries rich with prickles, hosting / a throng of ticks." Her 'I' is unbridled, attentive, and stitches together a remnant world of loss - our miraculous gain.

-Mark Irwin>/b>, author, Once When Green, winner of Juniper Prize for Poetry



In this collection, the upside world of logic enters the downside region of dream. Barbara Ford opens doors into tender, human tales, lures us deeper into the heart where she lifts cellar doors, leads us through shining cracks. There, spinning living mythology, she weaves rhyme, drapes a wooly spell over your head. The reader - like a child on the path home through woods - finds herself facing a sphinx, becomes a riddle solving a riddle, complicit and implicit in Ford's game. Generously, she lets you pass just for playing. You will arrive home, right where you are, changed - more aware of slant light, the breathing room, wild creatures at your feet, your beloved dead at your kitchen table, sipping tea.

-Rachel Kellum, author, Walking the Burn



To read Every Door Thrown Open is to enter a world that is "wild. Private. Disobedient. Miraculous." Barbara Ford dances with paradox: her language is both muscular and musical, her themes are both bristling and tender, her images are sometimes lush, sometimes spare. I love these poems. They surprise me. They wound me and heal me. They welcome me in. They stay with me long after I've left the page.

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author, The Unfolding, and host, The Poetic Path



Barbara Ford's poems take us into private moments - elegies for friends, family gone too young, meditations on a surgery, an ode to borscht, and other origin stories. The poet faces grief with a salvaged compass, dodges volcanoes, and bridges us toward love whenever we need to be pulled back to shore. While working through times of winglessness and brambles, Every Door Thrown Open offers us elaborate re-figurings, where we are bravely looking forward and looking back. Ford writes poetry while "speaking the language of flowers."

-Juan J. Morales, author, Dream of the Bird Tattoo