Foreword

Reading Bunny Pearlman’s Hiding Out: selected poetry is a lot like taking a long walk with the poet. A walk over four decades and through various locales. Some recognizable and familiar, ordinary and plain, others exotic, compelling and strange. It is her intelligence and seriousness that raises the poems above a travelogue or journal, we get to see her absorb what she experiences as love, as nature, as the passage of time, without adornment and self-explanation. As is so often true her honesty doesn’t bring happiness. Half the time she uses the poem as a microscope examining, and half the time it’s a telescope. Love and tumult put to the side, family seems to survive best. In one poem she seems most at peace at the end of the day sitting on the stoop with her older brother arguing science. And at the end of the book she writes “Will I live long enough/to re-negotiate the secrets/of childhood.” It is a question only someone who has stayed mindful, and is still brave, can pose.

— Keith Althaus