Starting with the title Down into the Upward Golden, we sense that this poet has been to hell and back—has traveled down into the underworld and returned changed, with hard-won knowledge to share like a springtime offering. Here is the myth of Kore set in Iowa and in other realms: across rivers and oceans and beyond the border between this world and the next. The lush language and imagery of the poems, too, hovers on the border between mythic and present time. What Corinne Stanley offers is no less than a guidebook for rebirth, even when it feels like all has been lost. She reminds us that the wheel of life keeps spinning: as we sow and harvest golden corn, we arrive at an end so that we might start over again.

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-- Becca Klaver, Poet

I am moved by the flashes of "knowing" and the questions that live together in these poems. They read like prayers and meditations on the sensory and interior worlds that feed and haunt us; they are therefore soothing and challenging by turns. This energy shimmers through the collection. It asks that we live more fully in the world and honor our own deepest truths, and that may be the only advice that matters.

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-- Rebecca Wee, Poet and Professor of English at Augustana College

In lyrical, often dazzling prose, woven throughout with poems that weep, call, sing, and shimmer, poet, author Corinne Stanley takes us to the Spain of our heart's deepest imaginings in La tercera luz. This expertly crafted tale entwines the artistic yearnings and creative passions of two poets, set in each other's path by a mythopoetic destiny. Their dual journey to fulfillment becomes braided together by mysterious synchronicities, as well as the presence of the Divine Feminine. Set against the luminous backdrop of the Spanish landscape, La tercera luz is an incandescent tribute to the ever-refilling well of possibilities.

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-- Judyth Hill, Poet, Maestra, Storyista

In the gifted hands of translator Corinne Stanley, Esther Bendala Pavón's collection of poems Silencios del bosque keeps the reader spellbound by a sequence of images, one as breathtaking as the next, that plumb the senses and capture the essence of the Spanish original. The passion with which Bendala Pavón ponders the anguish of restraint and the transcendence of the body is masterfully rendered into English by Stanley. This is truly a superb bilingual collection of verse that abounds in exquisite metaphor and profound humanity.

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-- Lea Ramsdell, Professor of Spanish, Townson University