Critical Commentary:
"Art is healing, it has been said, poetry is healing. And when times are as dark as these, poetry, words that are spun from a kind heart and woven from keen sight and caring, create beauty that is especially healing, for to name the dark and treat it with delicacy and grace is a comfort and a gift. Renee Podunovich's Illustrious for Brief Moments is an acknowledgement and a celebration of both the dark and the light, of both the doubts and the certainties that moment by moment make our lives. We need such art." -Rafael Jesús González, Poet Laureate City of Berkeley, California http://rjgonzalez.blogspot.com/
“Renee Podunovich’s visions are transparent panes allowing the reader the warmth and light of a larger view. She returns from journeys beyond the daily world with medicine which explodes in us ‘with no limits, other than the filter of our hearts’. Her passionate words form conduits through which we can meet our higher selves.” Cynthia West, author, Rainbringer and The New Sun
“Reading poems like ‘Clearing,’ ‘Heart Filter’, is like listening to soulful jazz- as if ‘the shimmering, shining, shape-shifting/ light’ learned to play a grammar rag, just to cast ‘the memoir of itself’. Like the redwoods and aspens she studies, Renee Podunovich traces patterns; her consciousness and that of the trees, the ferns are one.” Steve Lautermilch, photographer, author, Mirror Light.
“She takes us traveling simultaneously inside and out; noting, reporting on observations of the mystical experience and the natural in the poetic company of her rational mind.” Mead Bullington, Certified Instructor Sheng Zhen Wuji Yuan.
Renee Podunovich excels in her newest collection. The journey through these evocative vignettes leads us to the powerful understanding that we need to “Trust the empty spaces” and “let the scaffolding collapse.” The characters in each poem reflect our own Divine Human Experience, and Podunovich treats our vulnerabilities with tenderness and wise insight.”
–Robin Stratton, Editor, Boston Literary Magazine, author On Air and Then She Ran, robinstratton.com.
“These are poems of thirst and hunger, more hiss than hush, more jazz, more blaze, more pluck. Renee Podunovich has a ferociousness to her work that pulls us in and pushes us to step outside what is comfortable into the world that is charged and changing.”
–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, The Miracle Already Happening and Holding Three Things at Once, wordwoman.com
