Deborah-Zenha Adams is an award-winning author of novels, short fiction, CNF, and poetry, and served as executive editor of Oconee Spirit Press for ten years. You are invited to visit her website to read samples of her work. www.Deborah-Adams.com
Reading Deborah-Zenha Adam’s poems felt like being told secrets filled with wisdom, learned and gained from a lifetime of lessons, such as this: “I tell you now: never // trust the logic of a story // moving always forward” and “the storm is always coming, and the // truth lives in the wind.” These poems look back and understand the world’s intricacies in a whole new way, with a greater depth: “sacrificing // things we’d rather not, learning the art // of trade-off.” The collection offers truths—“I am an illusion”—and asks unanswerable questions, just as this life does. Magic and myth and prophesy thread their way through this book, and what becomes bound is strength, fortitude, and a new kind of enlightenment—hard-won and certain.
—Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, author of Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough: poems
“Instars,” a new collection of poems by Deborah-Zenha Adams, is governed by a metaphor – the phases insects undergo as they pass, molting and transforming along the way, from egg to adult. At the end of their journey, they join the natural world to live out their earthly existences.
Following the same kind of thematic arc, this book takes the reader on a journey of poems that reveal the fragility and uncertainties of human life, often with metaphorical, quasi-allegorical renderings of experience. The variety of poems, in form and content, makes this journey rich, layered, and thought-provoking. And of her many strengths as a poet, the most important is her strong, surprising, but spot-on closures. “Instars” clearly expresses an existential acceptance of what is, with no whining along the way, no talk of destiny and fate, but with the clear sense that changes and transformations are not only right, but inevitable and natural.
~ Malcolm Glass, author of Her Infinite Variety (Finishing Line Press, 2023)