Joyriding on an Updraft

When Deborah Dashow Ruth writes in her poem "Gardening," that "Fingers lease new growth/from the soil beneath the soil/where dormant life waits/to be coaxed into my world," she could be commenting on creative process as well as her poem. Al Young, former California State Poet Laureate, writes "Deborah Dashow Ruth's poetry -- always apple-crisp, sometimes ginger-bitter (spiced with lime) -- slips out to explore cracks in every sky, sea, desert and plain of our physical, familial and psychic worlds. Like vulnerable kites, these poems fly wayward, fly wild, fly into the heart." Originally from Chicago, Deborah Dashow Ruth makes her home in the San Francisco Bay Area.