In Loralee Clark’s third chapbook, A HARMONY IN THE KEY OF TREES: A HEALING MYTH, she deftly explores her most challenging material yet: childhood scars, survival, and the road to wholeness. Clark excels at world building in this collection about Mina, a lonely girl who escapes the emotional neglect and upheaval of her home life through writing, drawing and wandering the woods to transcend her estrangement from her family: “She thinks she will be forgotten like eyelash wishes, snarls embedded in a brush, water long after it has been swallowed.” Clark artfully switches from first to third person to offer us Mina’s intimate and moving revelations: “I took some beeswax and thread and I sit under the maples and oaks; I make strand after strand of soft, colorful leaves to bring into my room. They are my comfort.” Clark’s language is lyrical, tender, and anchored in a deep knowlege love of the natural world: “She will breathe onto the leaves’ stomata and watch its fruits, green and hard as walnuts, grow.” Clark invites us to accompany her on a mythical voyage through the forest where we too can examine our open wounds, the scars we carry and the yearnings we neglected or buried long ago. Through Mina’s imagination, her deep attention to the world around her, her commitment to her art, and her determination not be defined by her pain, we can imagine forging a new path, creating beauty from our suffering–even triumphing.

--Ann Chinnis, Pushcart Prize recipient, 2025, author of Poppet, My Poppet and I Can Catch Anything