"I invite you to fill that seat/and celebrate/that life with me," begins Lelania Fowler, in her book of poetry, The Shyness of Crowns. "Fill that seat," I did, traveling the poet’s personal landscape alive with surprises. This free-thinking poet uses original language. Writing in the first person she goes deeply into the narrative of her inner thoughts and emotions. She wants us to know that the earth is part of who we are and to go deeper into ourselves. "Canyons shake as you hold out the heavy things/what is to forgo/what is to stay/ you hold your own heart forever/flowers or ache." To be alive is to be part of the natural world in harmony or discord. You will want to read these poems written with boldness and taking on complicated truths.

                 Lara Gularte, author, Kissing The Bee

In her new poetry collection, The Shyness of Crowns, Lelania Fowler invites the reader to pull up a chair and participate in her "awkward grief and kitchen floor reality." Many of the poems seem grounded in earth with references to soil, mud, frogs, stones and puddles. "Trees for Life," is like an origin tale: the first lovemaking in a landscape with a river otter and heron in the "shadows/rib for rib." Her poems celebrate the wonder of nature and the mysteries of the mind. In "Matryoshkas," personality is compared to Russian nesting dolls, "many lives, each smaller than the next, decreasing in inner space." In exquisite poetic language, Fowler gives a staccato of images that are breathtaking: laurel, honeycomb, sugar cane, satin linings, dried blood, gleaming wood, graveyards, green husks, wet birds. Much of her work is about remembering, even though the past holds challenges and pitfalls, there is an attempt to regroup, set course and move on. She asks questions we all have, "I am short of this life/will I see a few more precious things?" Many of the questions are gems in themselves, not really needing immediate answers. Time is also a presence in these poems. "Breaking Blue," recalls that "things are sown or things discarded/you must choose swiftly." As time passes, with so many empty chairs at our own tables, why not accept her invitation to sit and stay awhile, enjoy the image-rich, erotic, sometimes jarring poems written by a big heart, feisty yet vulnerable. As Fowler says, "And in the end, love is a home where broken things are met with laughter and embrace."

             Jeanine Stevens, author, No Lunch Among the Day Stars.