When you turn the page, it is water turning the page. How water marks the reaches of who we are, as the book binds our thoughts and aspirations. Water binds us together, as you watch your fingers joyously swim through these poems, waiting for the current to rejoin us, to recall where we hoped to reside, and wait for all that you once hoped was possible. Water marks us, declares and defines our reality, a ghostly image that can be seen on both sides of the billion dinar bill that I hold up to the light to see the watery image that has little value from a country that no longer exists. Julie Chappell writes so clearly that there is nothing left to polish all the way down to the sandy bottom as her poems dissolve into deeper water.

 

~~Walter Bargen, First Poet Laureate of Missouri, and author of Orwell in the Kremlin