"Nothing Is Stationary is absolutely the right title for this book, so full of unexpected shifts, changes, and new terrain. Sometimes a poet has the gift of being able to write poems that feel as if they are about everything at once. Such poems seem, effortlessly, to be open to the whole world, to its tragedies and its loves, its moments of inspiration and defeat. The poet who writes them is often standing at a juncture of some kind, a crossroads. She is in a liminal state, reaching across boundaries, finding links where none seemed to exist before. Joanne Esser is such a poet in Nothing Is Stationary. She writes in the book''s first poem, ''Was I born in awe?'' The answer is clearly, yes." -- Jim Moore, author of Enter: Poems "Nothing Is Stationary, Esser''s beautiful new collection of poems, begins with her original, assigned landscape, and with the human mysteries of risks taken, or not taken, and the seeking of balance, of equilibrium, that this poet has sought between land and water, between different kinds of love and obligations, between her spirit self, and her physical time on earth.

As she writes: All the what ifs prophetic,/ imminent. And as she writes: We were allowed to keep memory, a legacy of longing. These are two lines among many that anchor us as readers to her deep contemplation of time, death, memory--those big-ticket items that some poets among us are assigned to consider in their books. This poet acknowledges her gratitude, the fact of love and beauty in her life, it''s just that she also can''t stop considering all the ways the things of the world can slip away, the way that we human beings have to acknowledge the dark and complicated truths about time, along with all that beauty. She writes: Everything seems to happen at once, and I still wake up the next morning unprepared. I put a clock in every room, yet am surprised that the hands keep turning. Yes. We''re grateful for how this poet pays attention.

"--Deborah Keenan, author of The Saint of Everything "Joanne Esser''s Nothing Is Stationary is filled with the movement of life. She ranges from microcosms (a squirrel in the yard, the tiny motions of knitting needles, a hand reaching for another hand) to macrocosms (cities, rivers, the moon, the earth''s rotation, the motion of memory and time). She approaches her subjects with curiosity and wonder - in "A Very Tenuous Grasp of History" she writes, ''I put a clock in every room, yet am surprised that the hands keep turning.'' Esser describes ordinary objects and moments with reverence, humility, and a steady patience. Some of her poems read like spells or incantations for a better way of being, a better world. She doesn''t hesitate to call humanity out for its failings, but even that is done lovingly. Nothing Is Stationary holds poems of great tenderness, poems that honor the world by noticing it, revealing a life lived with intense and loving attention."--Zoe Ryder White, author of The Visible Field "Reading Joanne Esser''s latest work, Nothing Is Stationary, I am struck again and again with startled recognition.

Here is life as I know it in all its fleeting glory and complexity but shimmering with new insight. This is a work in ''praise of everything that does not last.'' Exploring memory, boundaries, vacancies, and ''spaces that admit light,'' Esser offers us unexpected graces to ponder and treasure." --Pamela Carter Joern, author of At the Corner of Past & Future "Joanne Esser''s collection is as unexpected as Buddha knitting at the kitchen table, or as familiar as a winged maple seed. Here is a conversation between body and soul, woven through with love. Coming from an ''ancient deep embedded place where senses and emotions collide,'' it offers a clear-eyed view of hope to readers."--Jane Hufford Downes, author of Laughing in the Light, Birds of the Midwest, and other poetry collections.