Cardinal Marks
Poetry, Finishing Line Press
Cardinal Marks by Virginia LeBaron is a stunning debut collection of poems that navigates the complex terrain between loss and love, childhood and adulthood, life and death. Drawing on the metaphor of the “cardinal” as both a navigational tool and a hinge—connecting separate worlds—LeBaron’s work unfolds the tender, liminal spaces where experiences overlap. Blending lyrical beauty with harrowing truths, Cardinal Marks explores emotional and geographical landscapes with a keen, unflinching gaze, offering profound insights into human connection, memory, and the borders that define us. With influences from poets like Elizabeth Bishop, LeBaron’s collection resonates with both a physical and spiritual presence that will linger long after the final page.
Signed copy available when ordered through our shop! Please enter the inscription information after you click ‘add to cart’.
Poetry, Finishing Line Press
Cardinal Marks by Virginia LeBaron is a stunning debut collection of poems that navigates the complex terrain between loss and love, childhood and adulthood, life and death. Drawing on the metaphor of the “cardinal” as both a navigational tool and a hinge—connecting separate worlds—LeBaron’s work unfolds the tender, liminal spaces where experiences overlap. Blending lyrical beauty with harrowing truths, Cardinal Marks explores emotional and geographical landscapes with a keen, unflinching gaze, offering profound insights into human connection, memory, and the borders that define us. With influences from poets like Elizabeth Bishop, LeBaron’s collection resonates with both a physical and spiritual presence that will linger long after the final page.
Signed copy available when ordered through our shop! Please enter the inscription information after you click ‘add to cart’.
Poetry, Finishing Line Press
Cardinal Marks by Virginia LeBaron is a stunning debut collection of poems that navigates the complex terrain between loss and love, childhood and adulthood, life and death. Drawing on the metaphor of the “cardinal” as both a navigational tool and a hinge—connecting separate worlds—LeBaron’s work unfolds the tender, liminal spaces where experiences overlap. Blending lyrical beauty with harrowing truths, Cardinal Marks explores emotional and geographical landscapes with a keen, unflinching gaze, offering profound insights into human connection, memory, and the borders that define us. With influences from poets like Elizabeth Bishop, LeBaron’s collection resonates with both a physical and spiritual presence that will linger long after the final page.
Signed copy available when ordered through our shop! Please enter the inscription information after you click ‘add to cart’.
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Publication Date: 2021
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-64662-441-6
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Reviews
‘Cardinal,’ as an adjective, derives from early the 14th-century Latin cardinalis, ‘principal, chief, essential,’ literally ‘pertaining to a hinge,’ from cardo (genitive cardinis) ‘that on which something turns or depends;’ originally, ‘door hinge.’ As much as this chapbook is about maps, geography, borders, and compass points—the marks (including tattoos) by which we find our way—Virginia LeBaron’s Cardinal Marks also attends to all manner of hinges, to whatever permits two separate entities or experiences to connect: to doorways, for example, that open and close—in the heart or in relationships. These poems explore the territory between guilt and forgiveness, childhood and adulthood, and perhaps especially between life to death: ‘the tender, liminal place,’ LeBaron writes in Where I need my mother to stand, ‘that is neither light, nor dark/but the dusky in-between/the snow/before footsteps/fall.’ Heir to Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, Cardinal Marks travels unflinchingly through the coordinates and connective tissue of loss and love, with a sensibility that is both bodily and mysterious.
Lisa Russ Spaar,
Professor and Director of Creative Writing, University of Virginia,
Award-Winning Poet and Author of 12 books
It’s hard to believe Cardinal Marks is a debut collection, its poems are so finely wrought, so mature and fully realized. It’s all here—a sure command of form, of language and tone, a skillful blending of high lyric and harrowing truth—all here, and then some. These are real poems—adult life in all its complexity—beauty and loss met with a frank and deeply intelligent gaze, with insight grown from lived experience. Virginia LeBaron has been places and done things, and it’s our great good fortune that her thoughtful, deeply moving poems are here to tell us the news from far flung lands, the house next door, and the frontier country between this life and the next.
Jon Loomis,
Professor of Creative Writing, University of Wisconsin Eau Claire,
Award-Winning Writer and Author of 3 Books of Poetry
A beautiful book of poetry
The images in Cardinal Marks by Virginia LeBaron are deeply moving: A child learns to use a microscope, a palliative nurse cares for a dying nun, a house that is ‘too quiet and too clean,’ a young woman throws herself into a secluded pond full of joy. All of these images and many more entered this reader’s heart with the force of a peaceful breeze. I am looking forward to LeBaron’s next book. I’d buy it in a blink.