Instructions for Walking on Water   (April 2001)


By Jan Lee Ande

ISBN: 0-912592-46-X

Instructions for Walking on Water is the winner of the 2000 Richard Snyder Publication Prize.

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  • Reviewed in Image Update biweekly e-newsletter from Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion, Issue #6, July 15, 2002

Jan Lee Ande gives us poems lush with "the sloe swarthiness of raven and crow."  She pays reverent attention to "all creatures tumbling under the canopy of clouds."  Her spirit-masters are Hildegarde of Bingen, Whitman, Lorca, Rilke, but her voice is vibrantly her own.  Ande is a wonder-worker, and her book pure magic, poems that discover glory in the dirt of our days, transcendence in the stony creekbeds, angels splashing in the community swimming pool, heaven and Nirvana blossoming here, right before our eyes.

- David Citino


Instructions for Walking on Water is an illuminated manuscript that gives radiance to even the most humble insect.  The narrator of these poems is capable of sacred play.... George Santayana said a sense of humor is a sense of proportion, and with Jan Ande's poems spiritual wisdom is celebrated exuberantly to the accompaniment of laughter's chorale.

- Sandra Alcosser


Jan Ande's well-crafted poems are like a fresh mountain stream that springs from ancient sources. They are animated by a deep reverence for the world, by a sense of mystic awe, by a feeling of transcendental plenitude. They put us in the presence of great mysteries.

- Edward Hirsch


About the Author

Ande's Instructions for Walking on Water won the 2000 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Her second book, Reliquary, won the 2002 X.J. Kennedy Prize from Texas Review Press. Her poems appear in New Letters, Image, Notre Dame Review, Mississippi Review, Nimrod, Bellevue Literary Review, and Poetry International. Ande is from the Pacific Northwest and teaches at Union Institute & University.

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