This Small Machine of Prayer

I've been witnessing the making of This Small Machine of Prayer for a few years. The rigor in this collection is unlike anything I've ever encountered. What's an elegy without joy? How boring our imagination would be if we could already fly. How can we so carefully participate in love, in sharing meals with our closest friends with our grief so neatly hemmed up? There's a moon rising and a sun setting inside it-there's a whole world in this book and enough room for us to meet there.



-C. T. Salazar, author of Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking



Reading Beth Gordon's This Small Machine of Prayer, with its endless trickle of grief, is like an upstairs neighbor forgetting to pull the curtain inside the tubs so the shower is now creeping through the ceiling. It offers to the excuse to cry a little, talk to the people closest to us, then get to fixing the walls we've built around ourselves.



-Lannie Stabile, author of Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus