What I Know (Right Now) - Paperback

by Lynda La Rocca (Author)

Lynda La Rocca's What I Know (Right Now) eschews epistemology and renders a deep knowledge of the earth and all its creatures. Her rich music, avian-pitched, endows the spirit world: "somewhere/ a breath./And soon a seed is stirring/to a start." I admire her music and its fearless stance: "That I am loving all this life, /that there is not as much/to be afraid of as I thought.

-Mark Irwin, author of Once When Green, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry

Lynda La Rocca is one of my favorite Colorado voices. With clarity and curiosity, she attends to the world both outside and inside her. I love the way What I Know (Right Now) weaves together what is known and unknowable. I love how she touches the places that hurt the most and still somehow finds her way into "loving all this life." It's a book both brave and beautiful. Treasure on every page.

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and host of The Poetic Path

Where did everything come from? Who are we meant to be in this moment? What happens to us when we die? In this collection of honest and compassionate poems, Lynda La Rocca grapples with some of the big questions, reaching "into the heart of the void" where sometimes it is enough to know the mystery she finds there and sometimes it isn't. Her poems have too much integrity to settle for easy comforts. Instead she observes her immediate world with care and clarity, finding both pain and solace, as well as glimmers of hope and revelation.

-Peter Anderson, author of Riding the Wheel, Heading Home, and First Church of the Higher Elevations

About the Author

Lynda La Rocca is a New York City-born poet, editor, and freelance writer who has also worked as a municipal and general-assignment reporter for New Jersey's Asbury Park Press and a teaching assistant at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville, Colorado. Her five previous poetry collections include Unbroken (2023) and It Could Have Gone Another Way (2024), both published by Kelsay Books, and Spiral (2012, Liquid Light Press). Lynda's individual poems have appeared in such publications as The New York Quarterly; the Haiku Society of America's Frogpond; The Colorado Sun; Encore (National Federation of State Poetry Societies, Inc.); and THINK: A Journal of Poetry, Fiction, and Essays. She was the 2020 poetry-category winner of the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition, a National League of American Pen Women arts-outreach program; and a "Top-Four" winner in the 2021 Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest. Since 2004, Lynda has been a member of the River City Nomads, a performance-poetry troupe based in Salida, Colorado, where she lives with her husband, writer-photographer Steve Voynick.