Seedlip and Sweet Apple

“Situated between glossary and glossolalia, word and vision, the communal act of language and the singularity of inspiration, Seedlip and Sweet Apple reaffirms the tradition of American visionaries, even while reshaping that tradition into an innovative and dynamic lyric. Arra Lynn Ross raises the roof with her convocation of tongues. A pioneering collection of poems.”

“A creative and compelling rendering of a strange and charismatic leader. Arra Lynn Ross’s poems catch the dangers and the challenges of this woman who heard God’s whisperings, lost four children to early deaths, journeyed to the New World in 1744, used her body with others to warm a room with dance, and rejoiced in the sight of a deer or the pleasures of watching rosehip tea steaming in the sun.”

“Seedlip and Sweet Apple marks the birth of a star. Radical and transgressive young poet and writer Arra Lynn Ross has made a miraculous text of narrative and speech fragments … to raise up Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, her ecstatic voice, energy, and vision. If, as Yeats promised, ‘soul clap its hands and sing,’ here she is, on the page, in the ear: Ann Lee in the historical world, harmed and holy, brave, alive and in community, ‘a woman sowing seeds at the break of day.’”

“Arra Lynn Ross’s powerful collection inevitably recalls Robert Peters’s The Gift to Be Simple  and she is no less penetrating of Mother Ann’s psyche. But whereas Peters’s stubby-lined, intense, physical style kindled fire, Ross’s longer lines, occasional prose poems and narrative episodes, documentary interjections, and employment of voices other than Ann’s feel broader, cooler, more rested in the Lord, at last.”