Catalogue of Surprises

"In Catalogue of Surprises, Dorothy Wall compares words to 'a suspension bridge // a rope we've tied ourselves to / above the chasm.' Her wise poems look clear-eyed deep into the chasm - at illness, family history, despoliation, and mortality. At the same time, she finds beauty in the most unexpected places: pebbles, snail-trails, or the animals of Chernobyl thriving without us. You will find beauty, too, in Dorothy Wall's exquisitely crafted poetry."

- Susan Cohen, author of Throat Singing, A Different Wakeful Animal, and Democracy of Fire

"The poems in Dorothy Wall's Catalogue of Surprises acknowledge impermanence, mortality, and such existential dilemmas as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic, but Wall does not cave under the weight of these realities. She says, '...we are furiously holding out our hands / with their stone of hope / we won't let go,' and shows us that life itself is a catalogue of surprises where, holding our fury and hope, we can look at clouds and relish 'something bright or illuminated / above us.' The poems are elegantly crafted and radiate a light of their own."

- Lucille Lang Day, author of Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, and Becoming an Ancestor: Poems



"Dorothy Wall's poems are like flagstones we step upon to travel forward and backward in time; she casts a wide-ranging eye on life above ground and '...life now underground and shaken.' Her poetry is precise and musical, it leaps and turns and grounds us to place. Dorothy Wall offers us refuge and renewal when she says, 'beauty... is everywhere the sky is.' This poetry possesses the skill of an engraver, and the broad brush strokes of a fine artist."

- Joseph Zaccardi, Marin County, California poet laureate (2013-15) 

Dorothy Wall is author of Catalogue of Surprises: Poems (Blue Light Press), Identity Theory: New and Selected Poems (Blue Light Press) and Encounters with the Invisible: Unseen Illness, Controversy, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Southern Methodist University Press), and coauthor of Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction (St. Martin's Press). Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Prairie Schooner, Witness, Bellevue Literary Review, Sonora Review, Cimarron Review, AMA Journal of Ethics, California Magazine, The Writer, Dos Passos Review, Nimrod, Puerto del Sol, San Francisco Chronicle and others. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at Napa Valley College, San Francisco State University, and U.C. Berkeley Extension, and works as a writing coach in Oakland.