REVIEWS & PRAISE

“Using dark arts of incantation and understatement, Isabel Zuber makes poems that draw us into their spaces—allusive stories of Thens, Nows and Nevers, haunted by spirits of Always.” 

  — Sarah Lindsay, National Book Award Finalist and author of Twigs and Knucklebones

"Isabel Zuber's poems are like last night's dreams—familiar and mysterious. Like dreams, they are short and last forever. When I awake from them, I feel comforted."

  — Emily Herring Wilson, author of Becoming Elizabeth Lawrence: Discovered Letters of a Southern Gardener

“Isabel Zuber’s poems weave their way quietly and sinuously into the reader’s ear and imagination. Their emotional landscape pulses with mystery mixed with a keen-eyed awareness of life’s seasons and the reverberations that ripple ceaselessly from that knowledge. As lace is a snare in ‘Craft,’ so are these poems, seducing us with their tapestry of language and image. Poem by poem, Red Lily weaves its spell, casts its web of womanly voice and experience.” 

  — Kathryn Stripling Byer, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of Coming to Rest: Poems

“Red Lily is a sinewy, pungent, world-knowing collection of poems that engrave themselves upon the memory as upon a granite slab. Isabel Zuber speaks here in a voice intimate and eloquent, her tone as grainy as a weathered oak board, yet fresh and tender as dogtooth violets. Her attention touches everything, including ‘stars distant and various / and most unnamed.’ These poems shall abide.” 

  — Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina and author of Shadow Box: Poems

About the Author

Isabel Zuber was born and grew up in Boone, North Carolina, when it was a small town with few traffic problems. She graduated from Appalachian State University and received a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has been a librarian, a small press publisher, a gardener, an inventive vegetarian cook, and a homemaker. She has served on the boards of the North Carolina Writers Network, the Salem College Center for Women Writers, and the Grassy Creek Neighborhood Alliance. Her poetry and short fiction have appeared in Poetry, The American Voice, The Small Farm, The Greensboro Review, The Arts Journal, Now and Then, Pembroke Magazine, The Laurel Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Sandhills Review, Cave Wall, and other magazines. She has published two collections of poetry, Oriflamb, which won the North Carolina Writers Network chapbook prize, and Winter’s Exile, poems for her father. Her novel Salt was published by Picador in 2002 and was given the First Novel Award from Virginia Commonwealth University that year. She has received a Forsyth County Arts Council grant and, in 2009, a North Carolina Arts Council fellowship.