Cheryl Dumesnil :: Gail Entrekin

​ Cheryl’s work is immediate, full of the small details of life that make it rich, and artfully-crafted while giving the impression of off-the-cuff spontaneity.  I published a section of her first manuscript in an anthology called Yuba Flows that we were putting out at Hip Pocket Press in 2007, and in 2009 the manuscript as a whole, In Praise of Falling, won the Agnes Starrett Lynch poetry prize and was published in the Pitt Poetry Series.  I was delighted for her, and so pleased that others saw in her poems the same shiny spirit that I enjoy so much. 

We became Christmas-card-and-email friends, showing up at each other’s readings when our books came out, and we have followed each other’s lives and careers ever since.  Her luminous poems continue to please and surprise me (and so many others).  They are warm and funny and alive with intelligence, and I feel she represents some of the very best of her generations’ work.  

-- Gail Entrekin, poet of the week