The Language of Crows

One of the most powerful relationships in our lives is with time, and in The Language of Crows, Lorrie Wolfe deftly offers us poetic lenses for seeing our lives in terms of days, months, seasons, years, "perennial youth" and "tree time." Her poems help us touch what is most precious-solitude, language, love, kindness, a small brown songbird, our own fragile epiphanies, milkweed floss and the brief flutter of our lives-even as we learn to let it all go. A beautiful collection of free verse and form, humble and wildly true.

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and Hush


From the opening poem, "Creation," throughout this collection of poems, a singular vision of human life blossoms that derives from the poet's love of nature and radiates like the psalms of Orpheus with the presence of people she loves. She loves like a hummingbird, "whirling feathers in a showy dive;" she notices the arrival of a first frost as "Egyptian gauze;" the splendor of fall aspens "spill their golden coins;" she follows mountain trails which are "highways for birds and small-footed animals;" indeed, the book is resplendent with bird song and earned wisdom and a special kind of reverence for life itself as in "A Seed's Prayer." Readers of this fine collection will be richly rewarded with the knowledge that nothing cherished is truly lost.

-Bill Tremblay, author of Walks Along the Ditch


In The Language of Crows, the poet balances on a tightrope between turning seasons and grief's seasons. Its poems capture images of the luminous world around us, its tangled, exquisite self: the "cottonwood's ruckled trunk." Certain poems vibrate with birds, from hummingbird to crow, owl to flicker, heron to hawk. Other poems grieve the one who came, who loved, who will not return, yet is present as words emerge from loss: "letting go of grief makes all things possible." Wings. Flight.

-Veronica Patterson, author of Sudden White Fan and Swan, What Shores?


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Lorrie Wolfe is a poet, technical writer and editor living in northern Colorado. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. Her work has appeared in Plant-Human Quarterly, Earth's Daughters, Progenitor Journal, Tulip Tree Review, Pilgrimage, Pooled Ink, Encore, and others. Her chapbook, Holding: from Shtetl to Santa, was published by Green Fuse Press. She edited and contributed to the 2017 anthologies Mountains, Myths & Memories and Going Deeper. She served as poetry editor for RISE, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award for anthologies. Lorrie was named Poet of the Year at Denver's Ziggie's Poetry Festival for 2014-15. Her two-word mantra is "Show up."