Instead of drawing edges / draw the heart of the thing: thus opens the first poem of Susan Lefler's Rendering the Bones. Lefler sets up a serious imperative for her reader, and honestly so, since throughout this deeply moving and exquisitely crafted book, she never fails to follow her own advice. Lefler moves easily between a world of broken umbrellas, mad old roosters, stubborn warts and a darker world of earthquakes, hurricanes, the poignant deaths of her own mother and father. I have long awaited a full-length collection by this fine poet. Rendering the Bones is even more deeply satisfying than I imagined.
- Cathy Smith Bowers

Rendering the Bones is a living mandala that opens and opens at its center in an endless dance of disappearance, transformation and reappearance, "drawing life from so far back it's new." These poems hold together with a tenderness that dissolves the boundaries between the world we're given to know and the one we are not…. "What is it like to crawl / from your own mouth / leaving crystal tangles on the floor?" the voice of the collection asks a snake at large in an abandoned house, and the poems themselves answer - the earth quakes and we can only "continue to breathe / and plead / and shake."
- Diane Gilliam

In a time when writing poetry seems to be more about self-promotion than art, Susan Lefler's first collection of poems brings us gently back to the transformation that happens when poetry becomes a way of rendering one's life.… Rendering the Bones achieves what the late Richard Hugo claimed was the bottom line for any poem - believability. The reader trusts these poems, knowing they contain no empty air, rather the human breath itself rendering the things of this world and their mysteries through language.
- Kathryn Stripling Byer

Rendering the Bones (Wind Publications)
ISBN 978-1-936138-30-2 $15.00
Available from your local bookstore, from online vendors such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or from the publisher.
Review copies available upon request. E-mail books@windpub.com
Wind Publications, 600 Overbrook Dr, Nicholasville, Kentucky 40356