“From suburban Kansas to Cyprus to Kenya to The Great British Baking Show, the speaker of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet doesn’t stop wondering. The wonderment these poems express feels like a slow cool drink of water on a hot day: that refreshing and that right. Time passes, a girl grows up, sorrow falls into its necessary place beside joy, and an array of characters—a mother, a sister, a daughter, a bad boyfriend—begin to feel like our own connections. (Framing it all is nothing less than the entire natural world and familiar domestic spaces, lovingly reimagined.) This book offers you the gift of wise and wild marveling. As Anne Graue says, “Come on. Take it.”” — Kathleen Ossip

“Anne Graue’s mastery is in writing the tension between compelling forces: the conflict and gathering that defines her Kansas, the modus operandi of enchant and dismiss claimed by her charismatic first boyfriend, the inevitable remembrance and erasure of a mother whose hold on reality slips (“How many cups of flour are in one day?”), and the embrace and release of the poet mothering an artist and a scientist, young women who fall prey to self-critique. A 45 of Neil Diamond’s “Cherry, Cherry” concealed inside the young poet’s shirt as she pedals her purple Huffy travels through this collection, and later, the guy with a “full and plum-colored velvet” voice drives her in his cherry red Cutlass to adventure and disquiet, plus the tree of cherries eaten by starlings and robins seems short and depleted when she and her adult siblings flood their mother’s house with ‘whatever we’ve wrought in assumptions/and regret”. At turns vivid and subtle, and always insightful, Graue engages us fully with her brilliant first collection.” – Amy Holman

“In Anne Graue’s Full and Plum-Colored Velvet memories rise like heat off of a dusty road. This book contains a childhood full of little ghosts, and the tensions and smoke that snake underneath a family. In these poems place is not just a spot on the map, but its weather, its foods, a rich world full of fauna and tornado sirens. Graue has given us a collection full of remembrances that make the past vivid, and looks forward to a future with daughters carrying stories into a clear and calm summer.” – Tracy Brimhall