In this, her debut collection, Millicent Ally sets out to interpret her wide and sometimes painful experience of "this earthly animation . . . in the four sections [she] categorize[s] as 'Life, ' 'Love, ' 'Introspection, ' and 'God'." A Los Angeles native who was reared in Georgia, Ally shares, in the fourteen poems that comprise each of the four sections of her book, intimate details of betrayal and triumph: love gone almost right--and love gone inexplicably wrong; faith--and the crisis of its utter lack; the loving light of family--and the dark shadow it can cast. Reading, we find ourselves understanding loneliness, friendship, isolation, and despair until, ultimately, Ally brings us to the truth of the spirit that allows her to transcend all the pain of her deep humanity. "Spirit is the cradle from which we are born," she writes, and, having lived, ". . . we yield to the paradoxical Omega to which we must return." For Ally, all that occurs in between birth and death occurs solely for our deepest learning, nothing more--nor less--than "experiences which help us to gather information for our souls' collective evolution." For her reader, there is comfort to be found in Ally's conclusi
About the Author: Millicent Ally's fondest early memories are of her mother, an aspiring novelist, reading to young Millie chapters from her own book. An avid reader, Ally's mother further influenced Ally with the gift of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. An only child, whose mother and stepfather moved the family from coast to coast and town to town, Ally found her truest companionship in poetry and books. And, at the age of thirteen, she found that the poetry she had been reading had taken root. It was then that Ally began to write, employing lyric and verse as therapy to deal with the challenging circumstances she faced. From then until now, Ally has written because she is compelled to do so. Even so, for most of her life, Ally wrote only for herself and a few special friends. It wasn't until 2006, during the course of what she remembers as an emotionally difficult year, that the idea of sharing her poems more widely occurred to her, when a friend and spiritual advisor suggested Ally collect her poetry in a book. Encouraged by this, and by the support of a professor who exhibited interest in her writing, Ally began the journey which has found its fulfillment in this collection. Still compelled to tell stories, Ally is currently attending the prestigious Writer's Boot Camp in Santa Monica, California, studying television and screen-writing.