The Remaining Ingredients

"In her new collection of poems, The Remaining Ingredients, Ellen Foos takes on the challenges, frustrations and, ultimately, joys of 'marrying and adopting / in one giant late-middle-age swoop.' And that's just the beginning of a wide-ranging perspective that she offers, with reflections on humanity's incongruities, death's inevitability, family roots and enduring ties, old friendships, and so much more. The poems are rendered masterfully with plain-spoken candor-some graced with a gentle but insistent social consciousness and others with a touch of soft-spoken humor. Having attained a lifetime of varied experience, Foos knows, 'It's okay to stir instead of shake / the remaining ingredients.'" -James Keane, author of *What Comes Next* "A careful noticing enriches these poems. There is awe at the ordinary, 'held aloft / by the grace of unconcern.' Joy rises at the embracing of new life, from within and without. Alongside is yearning, of being 'wrinkled with expectation.' Deft observations of our society are freely sprinkled in...as are insights, gently realized, that feel like home truths. The ingredients Ellen Foos offers taste like real food." -Wayne LeBlanc