With a simplicity that is poignant, disarming and profound, Ethel Rackin explores the complexities and depths of what it means to be alive with astonishing insight, sensitivity, and quietude. There is in these poems an immersion in thought, in time, in feeling so complete and so irresistible I find myself drawn back to them again and again. One of the finest books of poetry I have read in a long time. — Carole Maso

Vantage points blur, patterns commingle into space, days, and seekings in Ethel Rackin’s newest collection, In Time. Harbingers of the relational, the what-may-not-always-be, and the lost swell in these poems, “if I touch the tree/ the tree touches me,” where the voice turns to the more-than-human world for healing. All the greening within the book unfurls, and the ebbs of past and present meld together as these poems contemplate grief, illness, ancestry, the naturalness of our humanity, Ruefle’s menopause poem, maternal relationships, the flicking of bees, absences, gardens, the sparrow in the chest, forgiveness, the hidden things in the spine, and the traces that remain after death—in all whispers and weights—makes its mark. — Felicia Zamora

In her fourth book of poetry, In Time, Ethel Rackin continues and deepens the prismatic approach of her previous books. From ordinary time, “Thanks // for your call,” an early poem opens, to the wide sweep of geological time, Rackin investigates messages sent between friends, from the self to the world, and back, with the almost weightless feeling of the in-betweenness of days. Balanced between mortality and continuance, in an act of finding the moment where they meet, these are poems that reveal just enough to intimate the great wealth of the unsaid hovering behind. It’s a deeply honest mystery, as the speaker, and reader, “…[wait]/ for something to be lifted—/ something like life—/ for a path to be cleared.” — John Gallaher