Water-Rites deals with cycles of love, loss and the cruelty and beauty found in nature and in humankind. [Ann Michael] plumbs the depths of loss and looks carefully at her surroundings to glean further meanings....The creatures that people her book are also guides, not as easy symbols, but as part of what life at the edge of the wood, and at the edge of the world, offers if observed....The book becomes host to an awareness that nothing can be avoided—we must live here on earth with or without gods or a god. 

—Beatrix Gates, author of In the Open

Water-Rites is a meticulous weaving of lyric poems that reinterpret the themes of loss and grief via a language of love and regeneration...the mysteries found in the questions a child asks of her god and the universe, the yearnings found in the questions an adult asks of her body, her mind, and her heart.  The tension . . . happens between the need to hold on to what was and the drive to open her arms to the future…. [In] a series of love poems to her recently-deceased friend, David Dunn . . . the reader is given a microcosm of the [collection] as a whole; the living, the dying, the naming, the water—the endless cycles of life. 

—Elena Georgiou, author of Mercy Mercy Me

Ann Michael has found a vast universe in very small places, and every poem is a return to a much-loved landscape. One thinks of William Blake’s “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a wild Flower.” 

—Harry Humes, author of August Evening with Trumpet

Ann Michael says, “There is nothing wonderful here,” but clearly, she’s wrong, as Water-Rites contains many wonders:  goldfinches, “lovely in the lost way of beautiful things,” the richness of beans that “lie warm / one inch below the earth; uncounted yet,” an ordinary robin’s egg, a yellow-shafted flicker in black and gold tail feathers.  Michael takes us on a journey through the woods of loss and grief in poems that are as clean and clear as water running over stone.  “I know what I daily know,” says Ann Michael, and now we, her readers, know these things, too.

—Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More