Bone Flute: A Woman Speaks
IRENE ADLER
Poetry
Edited by Angela Narciso Torres
“It’s been my great honor and privilege to serve as the courier for Irene’s windblown letter to the world. I can think of no higher tribute to a fellow sojourner in poetry and in life. I am certain that, like the bone flute, these poems will continue to sing throughout the ages.”
—Angela Narciso Torres, author of What Happens Is Neither
ISBN: 9781734496529
LCCN: 2025930594
Paper | 6 x 9 | 136 pages
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
List Price: $20 (price may vary by retailer)
Description
Inspired by Bishop and Dickinson, Bone Flute: A Woman Speaks by Irene Adler gives equal voice to the unspeakable sorrows and wonders of being alive. Edited by award-winning poet Angela Narciso Torres, this posthumous collection provides a longitudinal poetic record of American life and womanhood echoing Linda Pastan, Mona Van Duyn, and Grace Paley.
Praise
“Reading Bone Flute, we travel with the poet through the seasons of her life, moving through history, through memory, through geography, and yet with a powerful sense of immediacy. I feel certain that there are poems here . . . that will survive the way poems do, lodged like a tough plant in a crack in someone’s heart.”
—from the foreword by Nan Cohen, author of Unfinished City
“’We leave things at a wild velocity,’ poet Irene Adler writes in Bone Flute, her moving, posthumous collection. In poems that demonstrate an equal tenderness toward life and loss, Adler celebrates the small but profound joys that make any life a miracle in spite of suffering, ‘black clouds fringed silver.’ Here, love and sorrow walk hand in hand. Such poems are like a bone flute, one that plays ‘notes that made a bleak night shine,’ notes that continue to echo and shimmer in our memory and in the poems found here. Adler plays a fine, sweet music you won’t want to miss.”
—Sally Ashton, author of Listening to Mars
“Irene Adler’s poems are pragmatic, patient, and wily, defiant in their desire for forgiveness and forbearance. With a stark, self-reflexive beauty both airy and earth-bound, Irene’s small and sacred meditations reveal what the owls, birds, and beetles already know: life’s ‘wild velocity’ lives in every ‘quill, bone, and feather.’ As a sister, daughter, and mother, these poems that ‘sing with delight/for secret reasons’ will live in me for a long time.”
—Robin Ekiss, author of The Mansion of Happiness
“In this passionate, moving collection, Irene Adler distills a lifetime of asking the big questions into slender lyrics shimmering with longing, grief, and awe. With a delicate sense of music, these poems explore themes of romantic love, familial bonds and trauma, childhood and coming of age, the natural world, and intimations of the divine. In ‘Genesis,’ after laying out an alternate cosmology, Adler writes in a line both wry and uncanny, ‘In the beginning, even God was green.’ Cleaning voracious pests from her grandmother’s garden, her speaker sees not devastation but a vision of ecstasy: ‘We might all be drowning in roses.’ The deepest subject of the book is mortality, both that of the speaker and of those she loves, a subject she treats with unsentimental bravery, as in this terse advice from ‘Heading Home’: ‘leave this life more lightly than / you came and make swift goodbyes.’ Bone Flute is a wise testament to the pain and wonder of being human.”
—Peter Kline, author of Mirrorforms
“Bone Flute is a testament to the elegance of the word. Smooth-seeming are the waters into which Irene Adler’s words cleanly dive. Through an ease with music and form—from tankas to sonnets—Adler brings a pianist’s sensibilities to the page. Her unswerving observations of our human plight surface and surprise again and again: from the humorous (‘Above the poet’s voice a cry of geese / in flight adds honking to her sonnet.’) to the marvelous, through which grief and human desire (‘we covet in colors.’) entwine and complicate.”
—Cintia Santana, author of The Disordered Alphabet
About the Author
Irene Adler was a poet and English teacher in Palo Alto, California where she was also a co-owner of the company that invented the Aerobie flying ring and the Aeropress coffee maker. By the time of her death in October 2023, she had written over 2,000 poems spanning 25 years.
(Author photo: Alan Adler)
