Replete and vibrant with detail, the poems of Adele Graf’s buckled into the sky transport the reader on physical and emotional journeys, evoking landscapes of Canada with more distant locales of Greece, Latvia and elsewhere. It is also a book of memorial, where the poet conjures the profound stories of her familial history and pays tribute to those unsung relatives now lost to tragedy and time, offering a generous, compassionate hand to the past through her assured, graceful lines.

In these probing poems Adele Graf journeys to Latvia, site of a family’s trauma during the Holocaust, then on to Greece, Switzerland, Atlantic Canada and beyond before arriving home again. Every place along the way becomes a “charged landscape”. Every life leaves its “brief signature” in our imaginations. buckled into the sky is book of passages that sweeps us along.