Grandma Moses Press is excited to announce our newest perfect-bound publication: ACROSS A FIELD OF STARS by ELISE STUART.

Here’s a Book Review of Across A Field of Stars by Elise Stuart

“It was always this way, when you walked the paths slowly, gathered by the muddy rivers to wash, looked into each others’ eyes, spoke without words…” have you ever questioned what the purpose of life was? What happens after death? And if it all even matters?  Across A Field of Stars by Elise Stuart takes you on a journey through nature and experience, exploring the beginning, middle, and end of this thing called life.

Reading this collection feels like being taken on a long walk, at first through the open fields, then into the shadowed places we try not to look at, and finally back out into the light. Poems keep circling nature, not as scenery but as a kind of mentor. Trees, rivers, seasons as if they’re always speaking, if we slow down enough to listen. The poet suggests that everything is poetry, that the world is constantly whispering lines at us, and we’re just clumsy translators, trying to catch them before they disappear.

The heart of the collection, though, lies in its confrontation with loss. The poems dwell on parents who inevitably leave, the baggage they pass on, and the work children must do to rewrite their own lives. That honesty is hard-hitting: grief, anger, and even inherited trauma are laid bare on the page. Yet it doesn’t feel despairing. Instead, the poems recognize that change is possible, even necessary, and that turning away from the past is sometimes the only way to move forward. The poet ties personal grief to historical wounds like the Bath Riots in El Paso and The Holocaust, reminding us these are not just footnotes in history but echoes that still shake through the present. And yet, even in the middle of anger, there’s a thread of hope: the belief that change is possible, that love doesn’t just survive hatred but outlasts it.

The final stretch of the collection feels like standing at the edge of something—death, yes, but also renewal. There’s a dance with death happening in these lines, not as morbid fixation but as a way of learning gratitude for life while we still have it.  There’s a tenderness in how death is framed, not as an abrupt stop but as a return, a rejoining with nature and whatever waits beyond. I kept thinking about the imagery of seasons, how a tree doesn’t resist losing its leaves, it lets them go, because it knows spring will return. That idea of mother nature’s promise feels like the soft landing the book has been preparing us for all along.

What I loved most is how the collection doesn’t let you stay in one place for long. It stretches your gaze wide, pulls you close to the wound, and then asks you to imagine transformation. By the end, I felt both unsettled and steadied reminded that grief, history, and even death are all part of a larger rhythm. This book doesn’t just give you poems; it gives you a way to see, a way to walk through the world a little differently.

review written by our Fall 2025 Grandma Moses Press intern: Alexis Montoya

buy ACROSS A FIELD OF STARS HERE