Laury A. Egan, published fiction writer and poet

80 pages, 5½ x 8½ inches, hand-stitched

$16.00 plus $2.00 S&H

Available from Laury@lauryaegan.com

I devote this book to loves lost,
to those leaving or who will leave,
to my own final exit.

With these lines from the opening poem, Laury Egan draws the reader into a stranger’s world where she considers childhood hopes and shadowy lovers, the loss and loneliness of middle age, and the awareness of the approaching last stage of life, whispering ominously in the wings. Written with lyric intensity, Snow, Shadows, a Stranger celebrates the forest, field, and sea as the poet weaves her experience of the natural with the emotional and philosophical.

"Hardness fits my hand / carves the contours of my dark hope," writes Laury Egan. Snow, Shadows, a Stranger is indeed often dark. We endure with her "white spikes of lightning" and "tick of sleet." We learn how to survive longing and loss as she has. Her “affinity for shadows” helps us cope with our own. But this is also a book of hope. Her lush imagery of the natural world propels us beyond the shadows; she engages all our senses and we emerge from the book renewed, as if we too were "wild onions greener than new grass." Egan is a woman of courage, hers is a poetic voice unafraid.
—Karla Linn Merrifield, Midst; Godwit: Poems of Canada; and Dawn of Migration and Other Audubon Dreams

Selections from Snow, Shadows, a Stranger:

North Beach

Snow fence exhausted
with the task of resisting winter,
its gray slats gap, teeth decayed
into looseness, wobbling against
the interwoven rusted wire.
Collapse, coming soon,
some windy day before
piping plovers nest.

From flat boardwalk
beyond kiosk, I photograph.
Still, storm spent,
clouds press dark against
white snow, reversing value
of land and sky.
It’s tempting to turn
my camera upside down,
to make the world right.

Glaucous gulls, gliding
under dome of muscular sky.
Beneath them, alone, blending
with curving dune and waving bangs
of beach grass, I cast no shadow.
Cold stings my eyes, tears blur
vision and viewfinder’s glass.
What I behold bends, wide-angled,
as if encased within a globe,
me in tan jacket, red cap,
standing center, ready for
some omniscient hand
to shake shake shake flakes
of snow into wonderland.

Weeping Cherries

In crisp spring air
weeping cherry trees
cascade pink onto
a green lake;
wind skims surface,
pleating landscape
into squares
of jeweled mosaic,
into reflective magic.

Weighted with blossoms,
black branches bow
to ground, surrendering
with humility and grace.

On a gray bench,
embraced by swaying boughs,
I sit, longing to learn
the lessons of these trees,
to be an errant petal
light as flute music,
or a trout, breaking the skin
of water, flippant with joy.

I listen, as a far-off
whippoorwill calls,
and wish I were a bird
so that I might answer.

Published by:

FootHills Publishing
P.O. Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856
www.foothillspublishing.com

Photo by Mitchell Bell

Laury A. Egan has traveled to four continents yet always returns to the New Jersey hills overlooking the Atlantic Ocean where she composed her first poem at age eight. For college, she veered into the visual arts, studying graphic design and photography at Carnegie Mellon University. After graduation, she was employed at Princeton University Press as a book designer and later formed a freelance design and photography business.

Although Snow, Shadows, a Stranger is her first published book, she has completed two other collections: The Sea and Beyond and Beneath the Lion’s Paw and a chapbook, The Triangle Quartet. Her poems have appeared in The Emily Dickinson Awards Anthology, The Ledge Magazine, Sea Stories, Atlanta Review, Icarus International, The Centrifugal Eye, and Main Channel Voices. In 2007, her long poem, “The Sea,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In short fiction, Laury has written twenty stories, one of which, “Orbits,” received an award from New York Stories, while others have appeared in Paradigm (on-line and anthology), Grasslimb, and The Battered Suitcase. Most are included in her collection, Fog and Other Stories.

As a novelist, Laury writes primarily in the psychological suspense genre (Doublecrossed, The Mykonos Murders, Masquerade of Shadows) though she is now working on a more literary project, The Outcast Oracle.