Have you ever gotten to the end of your week feeling like the journey there was momentous, yet, when asked what happened, had a hard time explaining? Pickrell, undeterred, forges through a whole year of days with a voice that is disarmingly straightforward, modest in its approach and scope, yet generous and often startling.

Coffee, baseball, work, walks, naps, irritations, revelations, moments of grace and gracelessness… Aggregation is underrated, and Pickrell knows exactly how to wield this power, by just being willing to see and hold everything, the ugly and the gorgeous, the unimportant or unassuming. She shows us chosen moments like beach rocks: ones we might not have picked up ourselves, yet each one revealing how time shapes us.

"What are days for?" asks Philip Larkin in one of his most memorable poems. The answer is, simply, that they are for living, the gift we are given, over and over, from the day we are born, to make of what we can.

In Gathering the Pieces of Days: A Year in Poetry, LeeAnn Pickrell’s debut collection, days are for working, playing, mourning, loving, and finding poetry in ordinary life. Beginning with journal entries written over the space of one year, Pickrell revised her work into fifty-two poems for each week of 2018. The result is the chronicle of a life filled with the mundane and the sublime, small triumphs and inevitable failures, beauty and sorrow and sudden joy, and most of all, making art from the gift of days.

The 17th century Japanese poet Bashō famously told his students: “To learn about the pine tree, go to pine trees, to learn from the bamboo, study the bamboo.” Four centuries later, LeeAnn Pickrell has written a collection of spare elegant poems that, like the haiku masters, celebrate the beauty and sacred beingness of ordinary life.

In tracking our shifting perception of reality, Gathering the Pieces of Days unfolds as a litany of non-events that reveal the preciousness of the mundane. Whether noting the sensual delight of a sushi roll or Danish jazz, the author casts a spell not unlike the experience of chanting a familiar word until it lifts us into mystery. If attention is love, as some say, this is a book of love poems to life.