Praise for In The Folds of Time

Hedy Habra’s In the Folds of Time is a dreamscape vortex of intersections, a spiderweb spun from the streaks of shooting stars—moments unmoored from their fixity in time. The poet is not simply elegizing les temps perdus, although a distinctly Proustian precision permeates these poems—a mourning for lost loved ones, for lives shadowed by illness and loneliness, for what time takes and memory cannot restore. At the heart of Habra’s imaginative world is a powerful dialogue with art. The great painters of the modern era and their works become interlocutors and guides: resources for seeing, remembering, and dreaming the world—its past, present, and future tense—into being. In the Folds of Time brims with intelligence and affect, and Hedy Habra is an electrifying, immensely gifted poet.

—Khaled Mattawa, author of Fugitive Atlas

Hedy Habra uses her finely tuned “poetic license to withdraw from linear time” as she explores love, loss, and her growth as an artist. As dizzying dreamscapes following a return to her childhood home after over fifty years give way to clear-eyed memories and affectionate portraits of neighbors, teachers, and family, Habra seeks to discern “what is really worth remembering.” From masterful pantoums to ghazals, each poem conveys the fierce wonder of Habra’s musings and fulfills her goal that “every written page [become] a beveled mirror erasing time and space.”

—Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, author Maumee, Maumee and Doom & Beauty

In the Folds of Time is a surreal collection filled with poems so personal that they become universal. Childhood, exile, maturity, wisdom—each verse is a splinter of experience, stirring in readers’ memories of their own childhoods, overflowing with tastes, shapes, and scents of distant homelands. Hedy Habra is a poet-magician conjuring up a cornucopia of dreams and visions to be read, cherished, and remembered. You will love this book commemorating generational loss, survival, and resilience.

—Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D.,  President, California State Poetry Society

Hedy Habra's In the Folds of Time celebrates the variations and strangeness of life, until even our anxieties are a kind of song haunted by beauty. Under Habra’s alert gaze, life is charged with possibility—the “infinite ripples” of silks and faces that swirl into the colors of a painting or dream alleys. Habra’s riveting poems work toward peace without simplifying the world’s resplendent complexities, search for home within transformation, and honor the intelligence of ancestral women without being reduced to recipes and heartaches.

—Chad Sweeney, author of Little Million Doors

In the Folds of Time takes us through personal history where words burn like a prayer and dreams haunt like memories. Through family stories that move in a circle, these poems hold time in amber. Art—both made and witnessed—creates a lens for how people come to understand themselves and see the wild unreality of their lives. Hedy Habra creates a gentle interrogation of the past as memories wander through time and geography, bringing the writer—and reader—back to a sense of home.

—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal