Nancy Scott's voice is unique and unforgettable. In One Stands Guard, One Sleeps, we are allowed entry into the dramas of both ordinary and extraordinary lives, her work rendered in plain diction, infused with humor. These well-crafted, powerful and poignant poems flow beautifully and carry a punch. At work here is a sure hand, a caring heart, honesty.

Wanda Praisner,author of On the Bittersweet Avenues of Pomona, Winner of the 2006 Spire Press Poetry Chapbook Competition

In this volume Nancy Scott surveys her life with a loving, level gaze, speaking hard truths while reserving the right to fictionalize. Whether summoning immediate family members, lovers (actual and potential), businessmen, social service clients, or herself for review, she notes merits and flaws in just, sympathetic measure. Now that she has lived long enough to be daughter, sister, wife, mother, grandmother, and divorcee, lived long enough to acknowledge death's sway, Scott traces the signs of the times forwards and backwards, puzzling out the pattern in the drift.

James Fowler, editor of Slant, A Journal Of Poetry, Out of Line

Nancy Scott’s poems show what life is really like. Whether they deal with her own life, the lives of others she knows as close or casual acquaintances or her clients as a social worker, she confronts what she sees head-on, with uncompromising honesty. And though the poems are clear-eyed and unpitying, never sentimental, they resonate with sympathy for all kinds of human experience. Her subject matter is the nature of life itself: relationships, innocence and its loss, the fallibility and vulnerability of being alive in this world. But also of its pleasures. The poems never fail to surprise, especially in their zinger endings, dry, wry, honest, and sometimes shocking.

Betty Lies, author of The Blue Laws, Main Street Rag, 2008.

One Stands Guard, One Sleeps, copyright Nancy Scott, 2009, ISBN: 978-1-891386-32-9
Original cover art by Robert V.P. Davis. Front cover: Tree in the Pink; Back cover: The Old Country.

Visit the artist’s website at www.theartistathand.com

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