Gypsy Taxi
"Travel may release us from daily obligations but not from any central pain or loneliness. CarolAnn Russell's poems remind us of this, even as they give themselves over to foreign places, searching in Australia, for instance, for 'circular caves/ Where the songs come from,' for landscapes from which she can emerge 'as rock fingerprinted/with spirit.' And they rejoice especially in the welter of Rome, where navigating the streets, a difficult language, any slight interchange with another, is seen as part of the city's continuing seduction. Ultimately, it's in the middle of that wondrous confusion where even grief can be addressed. From an ancient Rome cemetery, she invites the reader to 'Blow a kiss with me/To the ashes/ The beautiful bodies/Death has dazzled into sleep.' The poet moves on, choosing life time after time, its 'one flesh,' its 'dance upon the shield.'"
---Richard Robbins, author of Famous Persons We Have Known

"In these poems, CarolAnn Russell travels the world bearing witness to the pain and the bliss, the suffering that lives next door to paradise. In poems of passionate spirit, she is always searching for the 'Flaming heart/At the heart of things/That keeps us human.'"
---Quinton Duvall, author of Dinner Music and Joe's Rain

"Lush, yet precise, CarolAnn Russell's poems travel great emotional distances, crossing borders of the spirit and the globe. Whether in Australia or halfway around the world, in Italy, they dive into the waters of the heart, and swim with intelligence and grace."
---John Morgan

"Gypsy Taxi is a marvelous collection. Get in the Gypsy Taxi in Rome and go for a ride!"
---Fred Moramarco, POETRY INTERNATIONAL

Previous Books by CarolAnn Russell

Silver Dollar
"These poems are expansive, inclusive. They are poems of an open heart, a heart that refuses to close."
---Jim Daniels

"She proves that the act of seeing is always double: that which there is to see, which we often miss, and that which is behind what we see, which inhabits and haunts and weighs on us..."
---Jack Myers

"I look toward your new book, grandmother, and send greetings. Your silver dollar, your mark of love always warming on the Earth... [are] credit the book leaves in greeting."
---Meridel Le Sueur

"CarolAnn Russell's Silver Dollar is a very American book. She faces America's beauty and humor, its bumbling politics, and the cruelty of its injustices with wide open eyes, sometimes angry, sometimes forgiving, but always honest."
---Alberta Turner, author of To Make a Poem

Feast
"These are sensual poems--womanly and wise...filled with startling and unexpected images."
---Marcia Southwick

The Red Envelope
"One of the finest first books of poetry I've seen in years is CarolAnn Russell's The Red Envelope. Both intensely personal and impersonal, her poems are broad and profound, with uncanny vision. Life and language are finely tuned together throughout her work."
---Charles Guenther, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"...set against the salvational force of memory and of art: in this first collection, CarolAnn Russell sings a sadly familar elegy with unfamiliar eloquence."
---Jonathan Holden