In Cloud Song, Leslie Schultz is a master gardener. The beauty and abundance of her poetry springs from both a generous nature and a cultivated sensibility. Like the couple in her delightful character study "Gilbert's Hobby," she tends the "rampant garden" of free verse and the carefully shaped bonsai of formal verse with equal attention and skill. Her poetic garden is filled with sunlight and color and changing weather. What she offers is not an untouched Eden, but a real world populated by deftly-drawn characters existing in various states of fallen grace, a place where the poet's attention always wanders from ideas of order toward the real beauty of the ephemeral: "sun slipping / behind the western trees, fish/tumbling in sparkles over the dam, / this garden in riots of color and seed."

Rob Hardy

I celebrate this beautiful new collection of poems from Leslie Schultz: her skill with form, the precision of her language and meter. These are stunning poems that witness adventure, awaken the senses, and reach the heart of the reader.

Stella Nesanovich

Elizabeth Bishop. Wallace Stevens. These were the first names I thought of reading Leslie Schultz's Cloud Song-especially Bishop. There is a quiet elegance to the book, and an openness to small details that usually go unnoticed; we ride-and I will use Schultz's phrase-"our ship / on the breath of the world." Here, just as Virginia Woolf would have painted her words through the artist Lily Briscoe to find the essence of a situation, so Schultz paints through her poems, with a textured and meticulous touch. It is no surprise, then, that the collection is often organized through ekphrastic work. While the focus of the book is the unexpected, Cloud Song is especially welcome in the age of the Internet. So many stories yell to be heard, and yet with Schultz it is as if she is revealing eternal structures, patterns, and themes. I would prefer such a master any day.

Kim Bridgford
About the Author: Leslie Schultz (Northfield, Minnesota) is the author of a collection of poetry, Still Life with Poppies: Elegies (Kelsay Books, 2016). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Light, Mezzo Cammin, Poetic Strokes Anthology, Swamp Lily Review, Third Wednesday, The Madison Review, The Midwest Quarterly, The Orchards, and The Wayfarer; in the sidewalks of Northfield; and in a chapbook, Living Room (Midwestern Writers' Publishing House). She has twice had winning poems in the Maria W. Faust sonnet contest (2013, 2016). She is also the author of two works of middle-grade fiction set in fictional Sundog, Minnesota (Do Life Right Press); and is co-author (with artist Marilyn Larson) of A Pocket Guide to Labyrinths (Chronos Unlimited Press). In 2017, her poem, "To a Former Friend, Whose Affections Are Withdrawn," was nominated by The Orchards for a Pushcart Prize Schultz posts poems, photographs, essays, and fiction on her website: www.winonamedia.net.