Paint-By-Numbers World

In addition to ten novels, Cassondra Windwalker is the poet of three previous poetry collections: The Almost-Children, The Bench, and tide tables and tea with god. The Bench was awarded the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Award by Evening Street Press. tide tables and tea with god earned the Excellence in Poetry Award from Cinnabar Moth Press in 2022, and she served as their poet-in-residence in 2023. Her poems have also been included in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She presently writes from the Front Range of Colorado Rocky Mountains.

Praise for Paint-By-Numbers World

“If a poetry book can be a page turner, Paint by Numbers World is it. Every poem in Cassondra Windwalker’s contemplative, biting, fly-on-the-wall-of-the-world collection is like a chapter that takes your breath away and beckons you to read just one more. The raw, often concise language precisely captures and reveals uncomfortable truths that range from the political to the personal—sometimes delivered with a tenderness that seems to ache, other times with a hard, cold stare. Written with the clarity and compassion that is born out of lived experiences, these are magical meditations, hushed shouts, and active reminders that beauty and its dark underbelly are twin souls that live within and around us all.”

—Michelle Meyer, author of The Trouble with Being a Childless Only Child


“Poetry that speaks to me ideally comprises three elements: a feel for language so that it can be used in the most impactful way possible (language to me is always a form of music, and your poetry sings to me); language that creates strong visual images and even tactual ones--placing the reader inside the physicality of the poem; and language that doesn't reveal all its layers in one reading but continues to peel back, each time the poem is read, to draw the reader in more deeply--and the reader can sense those layers in the first reading.

This collection encompassed all those for me.

The section of the collection which spoke most strongly for me was the set of Madagascar poems. Because of my father's non-profit aid work, I spent my childhood living throughout Asia, which provided me with a world space and a mental space outside of the one we tend to inhabit here in the US and Canada. The Madagascar poems captured the feel of, the reality of, a culture that is its own, and does so without condescension or that of a North American-centered tourist .”

—Tracy Wise, author of Madame Sorel’s Lodger