“If the world were to come to an end and begin again it might be a 
small stone with a mouth. Then it would be trees: ‘sequoia, 
redwood, banyan.’ Jan Lee Ande creates a new world in Reliquary, 
‘the words thick as leafbuds on your tongue.’ I do not know a more 
moving poem than Ande’s about ‘a tiny pink thing / no bigger than 
my thumbnail, like an itty bitty rat / but she was a daughter.’ It has 
been said that ‘poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Ande says, ‘Still, 
somewhere inside, the voices keep whispering / the ordinary 
prayers of the human soul.’ Elizabeth Bishop would have loved 
these poems. So would William Blake.”—Louis Simpson, Series 
Judge

    “In Reliquary, Jan Lee Ande has created a steady, contemplative, 
and sometimes playful voice, often melding perfectly the factual 
and the fanciful, the hallowed and the sensual. These poems bring 
new perspectives to the commonplace—a stone, an avocado, a 
sea urchin—as well as celebration to the mysteries of human 
experience and the cosmos. Many lines, many images, many 
cadences of Jan Lee Ande’s poems will remain alive with the 
reader long after this book is closed.”—Pattiann Rogers

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JAN LEE ANDE’s first book, Instructions for Walking on Water, won 
the 2000 Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press. Her poems 
appear in New Letters, Image, Nimrod, Notre Dame Review, 
Mississippi Review, Poetry International and the anthologies Place 
of Passage (Story Line Press) and Jubilation (Beat Books). She 
teaches poetry, poetics, and history of religions at Union Institute & 
University. Ande is from the Pacific Northwest.