Falling - Graham Pilar

"Out of the dark hole of grief comes a startling, at times surreal, lyricism in this poetic narrative which fall as burning meteors, dark matters making light, to suddenly ascend into the love fall. Departing of parents within a short span fifteen months empties her into adult orphanhood; fallen, staggering along the convoluted memory lane of mirrors where dreamscapes merge in the back - forward - standstill of time. A scrambled time stream she chose to play in this play, "before I chose to become an egg." I wonder the confused question marks dancing in bone chamber minds reacting to her acknowledgement. That knowingly she picked her parents to set herself up in order to learn, or perhaps relearn, in this returned cycle. The lesson of unbounded heart love attachment to parents unexpectedly parting while knowing life is a death sentence."

-Karl Kempton, Sandskrit of Oceano Dunes; Australia, 2021; Selected Lexical ' Visual Mathematical Poems       

1976 - 2022, 2022; Portraiture: Oceano Dunes to Tide Line, Australia, 2023; and chapbook, Moon Shadows, India, 2024.

"These are poems of vision. A view from above, watching, and noting. A view that will often come crashing down and mire itself in the earth, dirt, in bodies and plants. There is movement in the poems. From voice, to image, to the very shape of these poems there is breathlessness for the reader, a sense of falling and crashing from the words on the page. And a sense of rising back up. Falling down and falling up. And there is a beauty to the shape of these poems that leads us in this movement. Form here is stretched, pushed on, yet familiar and striking. This is a part of that movement, a part of the falling. These poems are breathtaking and beautiful, intimate and powerful, filled with images that rise and fall."

-James Tyner. Author of the Ghetto Exorcist, First Poet Laureate of Fresno, California, and Librarian

"The poems in this collection read like an instruction manual for living in the in-between, for living with loss and grief. There is an unblinking intelligence moving through these poems, reminiscent of Jorie Graham, but it is more than intelligence, as the speaker asks us to let go of the guardrails of reason, of the safety of the everydayness, to dive without knowing how it will turn out for us. It is a clear, steady beam of light we find in these pages, one guides us straight down into the center of the ache because ultimately, "Love is as strong as any death." These poems ask us to find our courage, ditch the "mind chatter," and surrender to "the raw center" of it all." 

-Michelle Patton, Poet and Fresno City College English Professor

"Parachuting, drifting, ascending, or plummeting in the realm of Falling paves way of exploration to excavate emotions shown through intimate testimonies in the space of a page, that even such emotions take within the self. Complete vulnerability, with its unwavering weight on both sides of a coin, are faced with a courageous approach on an earthly and etherical retrospect. It grapples the innermost self and identity to bubbling questions of primordial existence, the uncontrolled circumstances we find ourselves when earthbound, and the ebb and flows of love. Pilar's threading of words in conjunction to her unthreading of memories lend a cosmos-sized space for contemplation. She is an earth-diver, sharing her discoveries, explorations and happenstances of the heart with us. Falling is a mindful and emotional rendition of what it means to fall in, out, through...everywhere."

-Nia Onit, Poet, Visual Artist, and Student of Consciousness and Human Potential