In poet and artist Elena Botts new poetry collection: epochs of morning light, we see a shimmering, variegated new voice; we hear: where the trees still talk to each other, and winter feels like a song... (from When I have died we will be here). We feel the weather of her emotions; a contract with the ethereal and the visceral, as when we stand within the short but large poem: blossoms back to under the earth: I felt your ghost move through me out past the Baltic as though you had been in my heart the whole time. In this sensual canvas, beauty never suffers from loneliness, nor the sublime. Each poem herein as Botts wanders memory and weaves tapestries of word worlds, reveals a true and original voice in modern poetry: allowing light to conquer darkness; darkness to defy the estate of the sun, and colors mixed in ways only an artist of the pen could fathom - Robert Milby, Hudson Valley New York poet, Poet Laureate, Orange County, NY 2017-2019