-James Najarian, author of Jeffrey Franklin offers serious, nuanced, and often playful meditations on . . . what it is to be human in beautiful formal verses that make delicious use of our rich English word-hoard at every turn. It is the record of an intelligent quest for authenticity, and for how one manages "Living Right" at this particular moment in time. -Sidney Wade, author of In the poet's attention, like light-dapples, passes from parent to spouse to warfare to porcupine, transporting readers through a vivid past into an endless present. . . . Franklin writes in "Autumnal Equinox," It's a fitting coda for a powerful volume in which air merges with water, earth reveals itself as the once and future seafloor, treasure is born of terrible wreckage, and mid-morning is already mid-afternoon. This is a book of incantation and connection, offering both treasure and a hope of equinoctial balance. -Catherine Carter, author of Jeff Franklin's poems are brilliantly achieved and speak to us from a mind and heart that deeply know and feel the dimensions of the human condition - its capacity for empathy, joy, and inevitably, sorrow and loss. His poems help defend us against these aspects of mortality, making time our ally while we read, leaving us with a new hope alive in language. -James Applewhite, author of