And I Began to Entertain Doubts

With exquisite craft, A.V. Christie (1963 - 2016) threads "the body's beautiful secrets" all "splitting and doubling" through "what a sky can hold: the rising up in it and all that falls." As her lines suspend across these pages, we feel the fragility of our words, our bodies, our lives - of all we can hold and all we cannot. The urgency and beauty of Christie's AND I BEGAN TO ENTERTAIN DOUBTS inspired the creation of Folded Word's Masters Series: This is poetry to read and carry forever.

Elizabeth Spires, author of the poetry collections GLOBE, WORLDLING, and THE WAVE-MAKER, says: "In this strange, original, spare, luminous poem, 'pain's profound alone-ness' is A.V. Christie's essential subject. 'I advance: a ruin, an amalgam, a tracery - wound-connected - a grievance,' writes Christie as she meditates on the metaphysics of disease. AND I BEGAN TO ENTERTAIN DOUBTS is both shattered and shattering, an unflinchingly brilliant depiction of mortal vulnerability and endurance."

Eleanor Wilner, author of TOURIST IN HELL and co-editor of THE RAG-PICKER'S GUIDE TO POETRY: Poems, Poets, Process, says: "Only a master of the poetic art could transform the most painful raw material into subtle language of such piercing concision: 'I am the thorn' (the rose implied). From the white-hot crucible of the threatened imagination comes this extended meditation of an original consciousness in its relation to organic disaster, with an integrity that resists the disorder and isolation it also records: 'Each of us, this frail cell, made separate from the next. // Yet, there is a persistence.'"