paper • 80 pages • 15.95
ISBN-13: 978-1-935536-07-9

On the Other Side, Blue

Collier Nogues

She Leaves Me Again, Six Months Later

The hillside was blocked
with pens, horses of other colors

five or six to a pen,
and one long fenced strip

from the base of the hill up,
with dark brown horses flank to flank

not moving,
but their necks craning over

each other’s backs.
They were looking towards

the dip at the top of the hill,
and the stream running through it.

They were looking at what
was on the other side,

which was my mother,
whom I had just walked over the bridge.

“The interior intensity of Collier Nogues’ book comes not from the personal grief and loss that occasion it, but from the artistry through which the grief and loss are rendered and therefore honored…” —Michael Ryan
“Calling up what mortality underscores as irreplaceable, Nogues’ lines are models of intelligence, clarity and grace.” —James McMichael
"Collier Nogues is a rare poet in the contemporary landscape. Her work is rife with the quick jump-cuts and fragments many young poets favor, but there’s no cynical irony for irony’s sake in her poems. This is poetry that earnestly engages with life’s big questions….A poet is, among other things, a protector of thoughts, a kind of police officer of the inner world. Nogues... makes it a little safer to think, a little less frightening and lonely." —Craig Morgan Teicher from “Introducing Collier Nogues” in Pleiades, Volume 30 Number 1, 2010