About the author

Libby Bernardin has published two chapbooks, The Book of Myth (SC Poetry Initiative, 2009) and Layers of Song (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in Notre Dame Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Cairn, Kakalak, Pinesong, and the Poetry Society of South Carolina Yearbooks. She is a Life Member of the Board of Governors of the South Carolina Academy of Authors, and a member of the Poetry Society of South Carolina and the North Carolina Poetry Society. Her poem “Transmigration” was nominated for a 2017 Pushcart Prize.

The title perfectly captures Bernardin’s unerring use of metaphor and metaphysical, self-deprecating wit, as does, “Nothing to it,/forgetting yesterday:/I blow it like kisses to past phantoms.” She would never claim to grow flowers from the stones of loss, grief, or vagaries of aging, but she does. Her luscious, painterly poems find solace in nature; joy and beauty even in grief; simultaneously youthful and wise, and brimming with life; compassionate and unfailingly generous, “scattering seeds/like grain cast/among the famished,” sharing “the god-like immensity of ordinary things.”

—April Ossmann, author of Event Boundaries

Libby Bernardin's poems summon a landscape of vivid imagining—her birds, skies, stars, and wind. Yet these are not merely poems of the outer natural world, no matter how beautifully they render it. Stones Ripe for Sewing has immense inner life and displays the power of the poet as seeker, showing us how to “forage in hard and doubtful places.”

—John Lane, author of Anthropocene Blues

Libby Bernardin has crafted a haunting collection from a life well lived and carefully examined. These stunning poems question and affirm while eschewing answers. They invite us to “step into doubt, that hard stone, / seed of spring, of water, of fire.” Firmly grounded in the natural world, Bernardin trains her gaze deep into our very nature and existence, addressing loss and grief, aging, wonder and joy, all the contradictions of our human existence, with language that is at once lyrical and precise. These poems celebrate the every day and the sacred. This is a collection that invites you to become “a new person emerging from this hard case, / a chrysalis with one wing out, trembling.”

—Pat Riviere-Seel, author of Nothing Below but Air