Cassondra Windwalker – advanced praise for Swarn Gill’s book Love, Stars, and Paradigms

Intimate and intense, the poetry of Swarn Gill leaves the reader feeling awkward and vulnerable, torn apart and beautiful. Love, Stars, and Paradigms is a deeply spiritual work from a poet whose own spirituality remains elusive and out-of-reach. He proffers solace, demanding revelation while keeping sacrosanct some measure of his own self. I loved the constant companionship of science and art, how the natural world tangled and knotted and wove itself into every facet and cell of the inner world of being. This collection – I hesitate to say book, because books have endings, and collections are always being added to – washes over the reader like a storm, like a flood through an arroyo, and leaves them clean as the late August desert, open and aching for all the beauty they had forgotten there was in the world. Gill is not a romantic fantasist, though there is much romance in his writing – his work has political and social immediacy, and he is as willing to force the reader to the mirror as he is to open galaxial vistas. My absolute favorite? For reasons purely personal and unrelated to craft: Ghost In The Machine. And I’ll give you a line to look for in another poem : “I practice patience on hills.” You will be well rewarded when you find it. Search these poems, and you will find yourself.

Cassondra Windwalker
Poet of the full-length collections “The Almost-Children” and “tide tables and tea with god.” As well as the Helen Kay Chapbook Award-winning work “The Bench”.

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