GATHERING THE PIECES OF DAYS

Praise for GATHERING THE PIECES OF DAYS

The poems in Gathering the Pieces of Days consist of word collages and narratives. Selectivity is key, as past and present intersect. Nature; earth, wind, water, and fire; culture, namely art, music, and literature; social, political, and historical events; domestic entities; animals; friends, and family comprise the poet’s days. Intuition is key. Keen attentiveness to a word or a word group’s properties of sight, sense, and sound is essential in the poet’s discovering the extraordinary of daily life and making it into a poem.

Peter Mladinic

Gathering the Pieces of Days is a luminous mosaic, a handwoven tapestry of images, sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and emotions, a mandala of memories marking the passage of time as our earth makes her way around the sun…This book of poetry is at once alchemy for the troubled soul and medicine—as our indigenous ancestors meant that word—for our cruel and angry times. The year 2018 was full of turbulence and trouble and yet, what a glowing passage around the sun it became, in Pickrell’s gifted hands. Despite the terrible news that shadows our days, we can learn from LeeAnn Pickrell the art of living in our sensual bodies, in our deep emotions, in a way that honors what we find beautiful, meaningful, and profound. May Pickrell’s muse, Carpe Diem, inspire us, her readers, to create our own rituals of gathering the precious pieces of our days.

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky (2025) Carpe Diem, Jung Journal

Have you ever gotten to the end of your week feeling like the journey there was momentous, yet, when asked what happened, had a hard time explaining? Pickrell, undeterred, forges through a whole year of days with a voice that is disarmingly straightforward, modest in its approach and scope, yet generous and often startling. Coffee, baseball, work, walks, naps, irritations, revelations, moments of grace and gracelessness….  Aggregation is underrated, and Pickrell knows exactly how to wield this power, by just being willing to see and hold everything, the ugly and the gorgeous, the unimportant or unassuming. She shows us chosen moments like beach rocks: ones we might not have picked up ourselves, yet each one revealing how time shapes us.

Nina Lindsay, author of Because and Today’s Special Dish

 “What are days for?” asks Philip Larkin in one of his most memorable poems. The answer is, simply, that they are for living, the gift we are given, over and over, from the day we are born, to make of what we can. In Gathering the Pieces of Days: A Year in Poetry, LeeAnn Pickrell’s debut collection, days are for working, playing, mourning, loving, and finding poetry in ordinary life. Beginning with journal entries written over the space of one year, Pickrell revised her work into fifty-two poems for each week of 2018. The result is the chronicle of a life filled with the mundane and the sublime, small triumphs and inevitable failures, beauty and sorrow and sudden joy, and most of all, making art from the gift of days.

Carolyn Miller, author of Route 66 and Its Sorrows

The 17th century Japanese poet Bashō famously told his students: “To learn about the pine tree, go to pine trees, to learn from the bamboo, study the bamboo.” Four centuries later, LeeAnn Pickrell has written a collection of spare elegant poems that, like the haiku master’s, celebrate the beauty and sacred beingness of ordinary life. In tracking our shifting perception of reality, Gathering the Pieces of Days unfolds as a litany of non-events that reveal the preciousness of the mundane. Whether noting the sensual delight of a sushi roll or Danish jazz, the author casts a spell not unlike the experience of chanting a familiar word until it lifts us into mystery. If attention is love, as some say, this is a book of love poems to life.

 Dale M. Kushner, author of The Conditions of Love and M

Playlist for GATHERING THE PIECES OF DAYS

About LEEANN PICKRELL

LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet, editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, including One Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, West Marin Review, Eclectica, where she was a Spotlight Poet, and the anthologies Coffee Poems and A Gathering of Finches. Her chapbook Punctuated was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press, and her book Tsunami is forthcoming in 2026, also from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, with her partner and two fabulous cats, and has an MFA from Mills College.