Inexact Grace

By Abigail Warren

Back cover content:Inexact Grace is a grace indeed... This is a collection that exhibits Warren's range: many poems spawn empathetic heartache in the reader, several deliver lighter moments, even laughs. All exhibit the grace of both the poet and her characters.— Jim Tilley, author of the novel Against the Wind and the poetry collection Cruising from Sixty to Seventynticle of Light and DarkAbigail Warren's Inexact Grace explores family and community with compassion and laugh-out-loud humor. The poet finds just the moment when a story brims over with emotion. She paints a world where people care deeply for one another. The writer's big, big heart powers all these poems.— Zack Rogow, author of Irreverent Litanies and The Number Before InfinityAbigail Warren's collection, Inexact Grace, treads through history, through family relationships, at once both tragic and comic. Whether it is Ishmael and Hagar on the streets of Manhattan, or her aunt Eileen lighting up a cigarette in the grocery store, Warren weaves the absurd with the mythic. You will laugh, you will cry, and you will certainly not forget these finely crafted poems. When we ask of good writing, does it move the human heart, in these poems we can say triumphantly yes!— Paula Sayword, author of What Sleeps Inside and Canticle of Light and Dark

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regal House Publishing
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781646030446

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Acknowledgements

More Praise for Inexact Grace

Abigail Warren’s Inexact Grace is a collection of love stories; precise in their own veracity to this real world we live in where humans fail, long for, and continue to go on despite odds; this itself is grace. And there is no shortage of oddball characters in her poems: an aunt that pops out her false teeth for entertainment, a math teacher that has faith in a misbehaving junior high kid, and a daughter faithful to her dying mother. There is an inexact grace to these lives and in the telling of their stories. Ms. Warren has created her own Winesburg, Ohio, with rednecks from the south, a Jewish family hiding sausage pizza during Shiva, and waitresses that send tip money back to El Salvador.

— M. O’Sullivan, writer

Inexact Grace is a grace indeed. Warren uses language concisely and powerfully. In one poem, out of nowhere, several consecutive lines spring into rhyme. The wafered sun/ slips beneath the horizon/ and scattered molecules of light/ in the ethered night/ let the tired day go./ Sulfuric afterglow/ upon their heads. There are delightful surprises in several places, some bringing a smile—Like reading the label/ on the prescription bottle:/ may cause vomiting,// or feelings of euphoria. Warren delays that surprise, not merely by a line break, but a stanza break. Striking images abound, none more perfect to me than white headlights of lava pour through the highway creating the sensation of a time-lapse. The collection is organized into four parts; the first two carry a gravitas that extends well beyond the world of the poet, the last two deal with everyday concerns we all experience in our lives. Part I depicts various scenes in the life of an Irish family in America trying to make ends meet across generations; Part II paints vivid pictures of how various immigrant families of different ethnicities deal with life’s daily struggles. We might guess that Part I is influenced by the poet’s own family history, but whether or not that is on the mark, the effect is the same.

— Jim Tilley, author of the novel Against the Wind and the poetry collection Cruising from Sixty to Seventy

Inexact Grace

Abigail Warren

Regal House Publishing

Copyright © 2020 Abigail Warren. All rights reserved.

Published by

Regal House Publishing, LLC

Raleigh, NC 27612

All rights reserved

ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781646030170

ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646030446

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020930407

All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process,