Speaking Through Sediment

Speaking Through Sediment is a beautiful collection of poetry that moves deftly and playfully through a discourse between structure and wilderness, enticing this nature-loving desert girl! With heart and courage, light footprints and powerful strokes of expertly-hewn word and verse, this collection of poems both entices and soothes, and challenges readers to see the many connections between the internal and external worlds around them with many fresh perspectives.

—Ruth Nolan, poet/writer; editor of No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of CA’s Deserts (Heyday, 2009)

A book with two unique voices, one intensely lyrical, the other gracefully narrative, a book of masterfully written and arranged poems, a book of spoken songs make up Speaking Through Sediment. There is much to admire about this collaboration. For me, Michael Cooper and Cindy Rinne create a threshold space where their talents fuse, expand, and invite us in.

—Juan Delgado, American Book Award Winner for Vital Signs

In Speaking Through Sediment, Michael Cooper and Cindy Rinne weave together an animate, fire-breathing tapestry whose warp is collaboration and woof is collage. Little wonder, then, that their art is vitally, potently, and urgently alive; that in this vast poetry “Every moment matters,” spider webs bridge door handles, spin koans, and pick locks; identities split into chasms; phantom limbs burn; mosaics birth phoenixes; and voices rise from road-side earth. And O, what worlds these voices sing! Cooper and Rinne plait together poetic multitudes, colors and clangours and steep learning curves, and along their companionable way, usher in a new future for poetry: bright, vivid, sustained and sustaining. The poets, themselves, sing it best: “call all call live…When we leap together!” Fearlessly, joyfully, this collaboration reweaves us into our shared world.

—Julie Sophia Paegle, author of torch song tango choir and Twelve Clocks

This dynamic collaboration between Michael Cooper and Cindy Rinne hurtles through the male/female binary into the polyphonic, as the voices prism and ricochet past one another, multiplying in possibility. The trickster spider-god, Anansi, is spirit guide for this collection, at once postmodern and preverbal, as if the world rituals have been rent into fragments that ache toward the formation of a new web—text and textile, one which gathers all the lost, all rejected, orphaned and damaged, the repulsive and the lovely, to “reweave the world” to have “stacked the bodies looking for wholes where their souls peeked out.” This is a poetry that invades all planes, from bureaucracy to myth, interrogating poetry’s limits, even as it bears witness, unflinchingly, to what we have become.

—Chad Sweeney, author of White Martini of the Apocalypse