Notes From Refuge

There are several women in the poems of Lana Maht Wiggins and I am attracted to each and every one of them - their sufferings, their joys, their fears, and the sheer elegance they display when thrusting their feelings through window panes of splintered glass. I have discovered New Orleans in these poems. Her Notes from Refuge ooze beauty, sensuality, and a glimpse of hope that make you want to cling to life, as I do to each page of a book I can no longer do without.

Jacques Sirgent, author of Le Tombeau de Drakula and Euryale de Mortsauve: Les Derniere des Bathory



" The poems in Lana Maht Wiggins' Notes from Refuge are the underpinnings of a powerful narrative. The work is haunting and arresting; its clear-voiced beauty is also rare and compelling."

Darrell Bourque, Ph.D, Louisiana Poet Laureate and author of Plainsongs, Burnt Water Suite, and The Blue Boat



"Like the great storms that preside as its formidable governing metaphors, it proves that real refuge demands above all that one first experience the world as terrible, beautiful provocation: here we seek refuge not from danger, but from an overwhelming devastation of hope."

Jerry McGuire, Ph.D, poet and author of The Flagpole Dance and Vulgar Exhibitions



"Lana Maht Wiggins' poems force the reader into a chthonic mental landscape where the demonic escapes between lines. Eve's antithesis whose name is Bathory, or those nameless, teeming shameless from the page awaiting nomination reflect the dark feminine in us all."

Rhonda D. Robison, poet and English Professor, University of Louisiana



". . . a scarlet and dark absinthe worthy of Baudelaire and Rimbaud .

Hana Myo Shin, poet and author of Le Noir et le Rouge, L'encre de Feu, and Jeux de Dames



"Quarter-moons accompany these poems . . . a true poet, who made me fly through her art across redefined sunsets, suicidal obituaries, and daily life revelations with authentic ways of experience and sensitivity of darkness and bright."

Miguel A. Arellano, author of Vampiros en el Espejo and The Pact



"Several of Lana Maht Wiggins' poems can be considered as "gothic"; they speak of melancholy, sorrow and the beautiful sadness that life must contain so as not to be considered totally despairing. Romanticism and passion at their best.

Celine Guillaume, author of Le Serment de Cassandra, La Perle d'Eternité, Le Puits aux Marguerites, and, La Litanie des Anges