You pick me up in a cab
at my hotel
on the outskirts of Paris.

My first moments in this city
are a rush along the Seine to St. Michel.
We sit in an outdoor café

and you say to me, “Would you
have thought a year ago
we’d be here together?”

The little girl
at our table
has a tall ice cream

we dip our spoons into.
It’s too big and rich
for her to eat alone.

ISBN 0-9745909-6-7
48 pages $9
The assistance of Ron Kolm, of Low Tech Press, in preparing this manuscript for publication is gratefully acknowledged.

Sudie Nostrand’s book, The Paris Poems, makes you rethink the phrase, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” You wonder if the reverse might be true. The poems are so well crafted and contain such visual detail that the difference between words and pictures becomes blurred. Her stanzas flow into one another like a brush moving across the canvas. —Hal Sirowitz, former poet laureate of Queens, New York, and author of Mother Said

Sudie Nostrand has that very rare ability to make the spiritual manifest. Think of the Stephen Mitchell translations of Rilke. In The Paris Poems she uses the City of Lights as a kind of skeleton on which to drape her meditations regarding the immutable. For Nostrand this time is all time, and the Court of Versailles is still, literally, in session. And it's all made real by Nostrand's unerring eye for the telling detail and her use of the unvarnished vernacular. —Ron Kolm, Author of Welcome to the Barbecue and editor of Crimes of the Beats

Pristine, soundless, and perfectly formed, the sparse elegance of these gem-like poems spins in silent, volatile energy, whirling in upon itself, a cyclone in the distance. The meditative, painterly calm of Nostrand’s precise language is exploded by the urgent gaps between her stanzas and the tightly wound tension of her lines. In these works she suspends Paris in the air above its own secrets. —Maureen Owen, Author of Imaginary Income and American Rush: Selected Poems

Deceptively sparse, Sudie Nostrand’s poems open onto numinous worlds. This work is as strong as it is delicate—the poet’s integrity shines through. —D. Nurkse, author of Voices over Water and Leaving Xaia