“Tuning is a title most apt for Kathryn Beam Troxler’s collection of contemplative poems. As we readers tune in to the lines, we tune out the distractions that assault us... Sometimes in these stanzas there is ‘perfect attunement‘ that allows harmonic tones to be heard, even as, like the sounds of Tibetan bells, they shimmer into silence. “Be still/focus/wait/Be,’ the poet advises. It is as if her poems listened and took her advice... The last lines of the volume may be the best last lines of any poetry book I can recall.”

“Tuning: Poems by Kathryn Beam Troxler... Troxler’s work is unutterably lovely, translucent and powerful... Her work is taut yet open ended, making reading each poem both a defined and liberating experience... a sumptuous feast brimming with sound, shapes, color and motion. Her use of verbs, participles and gerunds imparts movement and animates her world... I loved watching the march of the seasons through her eyes...

Tuning... captured my heart and imagination with the first words of that first poem and kept me willingly enthralled throughout. Tuning is most highly recommended.”

“More than a poetry collection, Kathryn Beam Troxler’s Tuning offers us a book-length meditation on what it means to be human in poems that are sensitive, nuanced, and unpretentious in their learning. Ranging easily from consideration of ancient Chinese sages, Renaissance masters or distant foreign lands to the humblest and nearest-home of everyday activities—tending the garden, visiting a friend in a nursing home, pinching clay into shape—Troxler’s poetry ably engages intellect and sensibility in affecting language that will resonate with all her readers. ”

“Kathryn Troxler’s crystalline language reveals a sensibility exquisitely tuned to the natural world and its inhabitants. The poems in Tuning create an arc from primordial to celestial with much along the way to delight and engage the reader.”

“Kathryn Troxler shapes her poems with the “instinctive wisdom, old as human kind” of the potter’s hands in the first poem of this collection. Each poem in Tuning teaches us to see the world with new eyes and an expanded heart.”

“Kathryn Troxler’s poems move easily through a wide variety of scenes and situations. Her gentle wit often brings amusement to serious subjects and can give a metaphysical twist to situations that would have gone unnoticed by less penetrating eyes... I’ve been reading her poetry for several years and always find her lyric voice distinctive.”