Both intimate and generalizable, the poems in Source Notes: Seventh Decade revolve around two core questions: "If everything we said to define ourselves/ was preceded by Just like everyone or/ Like most of us, what would shift/ in the life-long construction project/ we call our self?" and "Who says age can't be luxurious,/ astonishing, sui generis?" Moving freely between public events and highly personal ones, both past and present, the poems in this collection explore creativity, the sweetness of age, the joys of marriage, early trauma, motherhood, family relationships, the surprising resonances of travel and the mysteries of savoring in place. Within and between poems patterns appear, disappear, transform, and new stories, without our noticing, come into being, teaching us again and again "we are never too old for rebirth, the hold of the miraculous."
Heather Tosteson’s Source Notes: Seventh Decade is a brave, unvarnished reassessment of the poet's life, an unsentimental reckoning that celebrates awe, wonder, and gratitude, while accepting and confronting remorse, betrayal, and loss. The poems in this volume express Tosteson’s hard-won wisdom that “our ultimate consolation / lives inside our most inexhaustible pain.” In moving poems that span continents and careen through time, she confronts generational trauma, and does not turn away from the choices she has made, or from the hard truths she has had to accept. For Tosteson, memory is both a consolation and a torment, and she braves “joy-steeped grief” while “drenched in goodness.” In lyrical poems that beguile with their music, and stun with their candor, Heather Tosteson invites us to share “the ripe wild fruit of eternity.” —Gary Young,author of That's What I Thought: Poems and New and Selected Poems
In her newest collection of poetry, Heather Tosteson once again delivers an exquisitely crafted vision of existence that is simultaneously broad and intimate, beautiful and fraught, manageable (through tremendous effort) and wild. Her poems do not lie. What is reported in these pages about the solace of nature, the enlightenment of travel, family struggles, the unbreakable bond of mother and son, aging and what it means to be a citizen in our current world is suffused with awe, rage, despair and—yes!—hope. In Source Notes: Seventh Decade, Tosteson is writing at the top of her poetic game. —Kat Meads, author of Dear DeeDee
In these meticulously-crafted poems, Heather Tosteson evocatively limns one woman’s courageous and authentic journey as she revisits the past, explores and marvels at the present, and dares to imagine a bountiful future for herself and humankind across the globe. Visual art woven throughout Source Notes: Seventh Decade complements and enhances text that reads not only as a poignant and powerful poetry collection, but also as a compelling, narrative-driven memoir-in-short chapters. The creativity, bravery, and wisdom of Tosteson’s narrator are hard-earned, genuine, and ever-evolving. She reassures the reader, “We are never too old for rebirth” -- and we believe her. —Janice Eidus, author of The Last Jewish Virgin and The War of the Rosens
Heather Tosteson's poems sail courageously across unexplored oceans of "the heartbreaking irreconcilability/ of cause and consequence." She is fierce and unflinching. "The truth grows cold," she writes, "if we don't hold it./ And we grow old/ regardless." Poem by poem, as I savored Source Notes – Seventh Decade, Tosteson's latest collection, I grew increasingly inspired. It's wonderful for a young poet to be bold and brave, but it's an even more miraculous feat for an artist entering her 70's. Her words are "pure fire, phosphorus white,/ burning from infancy straight/ into this very night/ in my seventh decade." —Lowell Jaeger, Montana Poet Laureate 2017-2019, author of Someday I'd Write This Down, Earth-blood and Star-shine
Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” So too does Heather Tosteson. In Source Notes, there is an abundance of wisdom, also an abundance of pain—abuse, mental illness, misunderstandings—interwoven into luminous poems in which tree frogs and quetzals are as likely to show up as estranged relatives yearning for reconciliation. Tosteson seeks to understand them all, and when understanding proves beyond her reach, she chooses to uphold the moments of grace that shine in the darkness. —Kathleen Housley, author Firmament, Epiphanies, and The Scientific World of Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer
In SOURCE NOTES: Seventh Decade, Heather Tosteson maps the inner lives of women in a way that is both mystical and deeply intellectual, keeping alive poetry’s big questions of transcendence, revelation, awe, and grounded presence in the ordinary.What a large and compassionate gift to the reader, a gift from a life given to inner investigation of what it means to be a human being anchored within the tangible things of the world. As the poet says, Trust the emptiness within/ and the rain sifting gently/ through palm, jacaranda and mimosa. —Mary Kay Rummel, poet laureate emerita of Ventura County, CAand author of Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone
“I just want to make meaning of my life,” writes Heather Tosteson. She does that with contemplative care in all the biographical poems in Source Notes: Seventh Decade. Reading them, I am reminded that everything that has happened and everything that might happen is informed by the internal narratives we, especially poets, create to make sense of life’s own unfolding narrative. A life lived vividly shape-shifts over time, if we are to grow. With growth comes reckonings, evolving intimacies, reconciliations, acceptance, even redemption. I felt more grounded in my own relationship with ageing as I read these poems by a kindred spirit. —Felicia Mitchell, author of Waltzing with Horses
Source Notes: Seventh Decade is an amazing collection. Tosteson’s well-crafted poems cover a broad territory with candor and depth. I loved her honesty and straight-forward tone, conveying, at times, abstract ideas but never attempting to deceive. Her remarkable photographs, so powerful in their simplicity, contribute additional levels of meaning as well, revealing the unexpected, the 'just-out-of sight,' or what often goes unseen. —Diana Anhalt, author of Walking Backward
