Joyce Meyers' poems offer breathtaking perspectives of time and space that help us place our lives in a larger context. She whirls us to exotic locales across the globe: a Buddhist temple, a Volga River boat, a humble Masai hut. But after traversing these vast expanses, she also brings us back home, where we find in the everyday scenes of our lives the true depths of the human heart. —Dan Veach, Founding Editor of Atlanta Review, Author of Elephant Water Read these exquisite poems by Joyce Meyers, if you know love, if you have lost; if you’ve seen “How the invisible / can grow monstrous / when no one is watching.” If your kin are flesh and blood, stones and rivers, trees and hummingbirds, expect delight, expect sorrow; expect to walk the valley of the shadow; expect moon’s light, water’s cycle—life, death, rebirth—volcano’s fire. But do not expect to swim in the shallows, nor suffocate in the sentimental: “Get down to the bone / and look inside . . . /.” These are poems of passion rooted in the painful, suffering, glorious, intimate world: “Trusting the fire, she touches / the mystery…/.” Of dust to dust, you will be assured, but “At any moment impossible to tell / if the door is opening or closing.” You will weep, you will rejoice, you will remember with the poet that “Nothing lasts forever, / not even grief. / Every river leads / to a sea.” —Patricia Lee Lewis, MFA, Director of Patchwork Farm Writing Retreats, Poet, and Author of A Kind of Yellow and High Lonesome In her collection, The way back, Joyce Meyers covers a vast amount of territory, for she has traveled widely, observed many corners of the world, as well as her own, and translated these varied scenes into impeccably composed poetry. Through many of these works, Meyers reveals her interest in the dynamics of creation, the metamorphosis of creatures, and how artifacts of the past are reminiscent of those who shaped them, whose human nature and mortality we share. We are reminded that to think of beginnings is to also think of endings. Joyce Meyers’s poems indicate depth of thought as well as feeling, tempered with wisdom. —Rosemary Petracca Cappello, Poet, Writer, and Editor of Philadelphia Poets