Tell Her Yes

A drop of rain slips from leaf to ground, perhaps to river and beyond. Like rain's journey, our lives twist and turn, hit dry stretches and unexpected turbulence, land on moments of beauty. Nurture and nature, with its solace and challenges, weaves through the poems in Tell Her Yes. Themes of love and parenthood, friendship, aging, dementia, and death wind through this collection like a river, while a heron keeps watch, and a crocodile lurks in the murk.


"Ann Farley offers us lyric poems that speak the language of forgiveness, of patience, of humility and reverence. Her poems remind us that, like a beneficent river, At our best we are an expanse of blue, / a shallow of nurture, a haven for all whose lives touch ours."

-Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita



"This poet is a caretaker, and the strength of this collection is appreciation, both for the natural world and for the fragile humans aging within it. Ann Farley's poems say a passionate and occasionally humorous yes to beauty, to loss, to acceptance."

-Penelope Scambly Schott, author of Sophia & Mister Walter Whitman



"Whether she is taking her autistic son for a walk in a wildlife sanctuary, bringing dahlias to a woman in rehab who is beyond speaking in sentences, or serving as a family's sounding board, Ann Farley fills her poems with pitch-perfect details that hit readers' hearts and minds."

--Carolyn Martin, Ph. D., poetry editorof Kosmos Quarterly: a journal for global transformation





"What a gorgeous collection of poems by Ann Farley! Tell Her Yes is as fresh as a day's rain in a dry season."-Emmett Wheatfall, poet and author of Our Scarlet Blue Wounds
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