Three Lines: All That's Left Paperback – April 24, 2015

Just what I need by my bed at night! The day winds down and so many times I reflect its impact on my soul. I can't always put into words how I feel but, I open a page in Three Lines and there is my answer! Please read page 14 titled Eye it so fits most days I continue my journey on this planet!

The simplest things in life often carry the most weight. So it is with Grace Black's 'Three Lines.' For prose that only encompasses three lines, her work often seems to fill every page. A most enjoyable and thought provoking collection - highly recommended!!

Raw. Edgy. Succinctly smooth. Three Lines... packs individual themes of emotion onto every page, with brevity... and brilliance. Grace writes with a rare gift for unmasked language, baring the soul... of a poet.

This is such a wonderful collection by an amazing author. Three lines may be all that's left, but that's more than enough to both satisfy you and leave you wanting more. Simple, compact, and all-meat-and-no-bread, the prowess of the writer speaks volumes.

Fantastic, elaborate, and simple all at once. Black captures snapshot glimpses of life with her three-word-prose poems. I definite addition to the serious poet's collection of poetry.

I got just wat I was expecting, a great book of poetry. Grace is an amazing poet, if you have have not read her you are really missing out.

Stunning, bare, soul-dissolving. Black possesses incredible economy of words. Three lines is all she needs to capture, strip, and feed the mind.

This collection of ink splattered in brevity — three line poems — is dedicated to “you.” The “you” being anyone that’s experienced loss, heartache and pain, which makes reading this a surefire exhibit in bleeding monuments to those memories, as most people can relate to those emotions, I imagine.The author, Grace Black, dabbles in the dichotomous pull of love: its ability to take and give pain in equal measure, as she noted in a recent interview.Many of the three line poems are visceral, as she intended, and engage in wordplay or play off of nature themes (ships at sea, for instance, get a few mentions, as does the moon). Others are, in a sense, meta-poetry, playing on the act of writing itself and/or still connecting it to love-loss. Spilling ink, often a metaphor for spilling blood, is woven throughout many of the pieces. Such as, "Weight,":He was living poetryMarrow clinging proseLying heavy on the lungsOthers meditate on life itself and dance within the parameters of Big Questions, like “Eye”:We see the world but prefer to stayOne step removed, one step awayWe sit, we see, we write our viewBrokenness, deception, betrayal and defeat are all common threads upholding the tapestry of painful poetry here. In one sense, Black has given us an “out,” with the brevity. We only suffer briefly, experiencing whatever manifest the poem in question, but in the other sense, that “out” is brief as we turn to the next and then the next. It’s brevity, but brevity that’s unrelenting — in a good way. It’s like drive-by-shooting prose.Time is also a theme, which there’s a meta conversation to have again about the aforementioned brevity, but one of Black’s favorite sayings is that there is no forgotten love. Such is evidence by the lackadaisical way in which time crawls by through the puddles of blood left in love’s wake. “Retrograde” is a great example of this:Sleep doesn’t takeTime merely ticksBallet of shadows on my soulIn the interest of not replicating all of the poems here and doing the reader a disservice of experiencing these on their own, I’ll suffice it to say my favorites (in no order) were, “Unobtainable,” “Supine,” “Deadline,” “Abject,” and, “Garden.”Let me put it this way: If you’re a fan of poetry, as I am, this is like a pocket-sized grenade of explosive ink and if you’re not a fan of poetry, perhaps this’ll be a great introduction for you to see what the medium is like. After all, it’s not as if you’re tasked with reading 40 lines for one poem. Three lines. That’s it. But there is so much in that “it.”

Three lines to a poem, a perfect brevity that conveys an emotion in an instant, drawing out a response that is immediate. Accessible and enjoyable I would recommend this to anyone who is looking for a new poet of quality, a new form, and is tired of the coldness and sterility that comes from so much of the 'establishment'. Personal favourites of mine are: Puppet, Uproot, Depot and Reins.