“Reading Fargnoli’s poems, new and old, is like finally receiving a long-awaited letter. Each poem arrives at its own grace, fully realized. Fargnoli’s grief is brave and learned. She writes from and holds for us readers a safe space to bereave. There’s a quality of loneliness in Fargnoli’s work that is impossible to find from anyone else. It is not despair pulled off a shelf and worn, but is a disposition fixed on connecting deeply, spiritually, with the world. This sentiment seems to be the initial mover of each poem, that tug before the first breath, and is therefore a gift, and carried like one.” — Z.G. Tomaszewski, Poetry International

“There will not be a more beautiful book published this year than Patricia Fargnoli’s Hallowed: Selected and New Poems. ‘You have been looking for a reason for your continued existence, / with faith so shaky it vibrates like a plucked wire,’ she writes in the opening poem, ‘To an Old Woman Standing in October Light.’ This astonishing collection offers abundant reason. Gathered from her four preceding books, along with two dozen recent works, her poems speak with gravitas, courage, and tenderness of the soul’s desire to bless, even through grief and physical suffering. . . . Hallowed: what an exquisite addition to the world’s poetry.” —Ann Fisher-Wirth

“Like her recurring images of the ocean, loss and sorrow have always washed through Patricia Fargnoli’s poems, and they do so seemingly with little blame or anger but with a quietly fierce yearning. Fargnoli is less likely to shake a fist at God or fate than she is to gaze intently out her window at the seasons and the ways they not only change the landscapes of the world and of our inner lives, but how we perceive them. In her ‘Dream Sequence,’ one dream tells us we are trying to find directions where ‘all the [streets’] names have to do with dying,’ and don’t appear on any map. Who, being honest with oneself, would not recognize the truth of that metaphor? And yet, driven by a stubborn desire to face if not accept life’s ‘disaster,’ she’s often able to see that ‘it is always there, the spirit behind the suffering.’ These open-hearted poems ponder how much we can take in while we’re here that we can’t take with us when we go, or even hold onto as we age. To ‘search … out again, again’ the simple ‘moments of glory must be enough.’” — Alice B. Fogel