Dusting the Glass

In Dusting the Glass, Nancy Kaye Dobson trains a compassionate gaze upon often unglamorous protagonists or uncomfortable subjects. Precise language and startling imagery evoke the subtle significances of everyday existence€”of youth and aging, regrets and revelations, dreams and disillusionment€”while the spaces between images allow us to personalize them with our own recall. Thus, we are simultaneously drawn into both the poems themselves and our own memories, and we then must, as the author has done, confront them and wrest meaning from them. In any case, to read these poems, we must be undaunted by what we might find, as Dobson must have been when she stared these always human and often haunting images directly in the face.

A native Californian, Nancy Kaye Dobson began writing at the age of fifteen and won her first writing award a year later. While an undergraduate at Cal Poly State University in San Luis Obispo, she accumulated several more awards for writing, including the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing has previously been published in Byzantium, Cal Poly's annual literary journal as well as The Sun Magazine. Ms. Dobson has also been invited to read at several poetry festivals at colleges and universities throughout California. Currently, she lives with her family in Northern California where she teaches high school English.