The Old Moon in Her Arms

“The Old Moon in Her Arms is a gift of storytelling magic. Lorri Neilsen Glenn delivers the reader into a dimension where the past is the present is the future. Early on, she writes ‘If I knocked on your door today, you wouldn’t believe how many women would be standing there.’ By the end, we do believe. And we want her to knock on our door, so we can talk on the porch, that liminal women’s space that is, what Lorri calls “a means to be both in the house and connected to the community.” This book is like the best porch visit, where you are heard, your spirit and mind are enlarged and transformed by the power of story. I am so grateful for this writer and this book.”
–Shelagh Rogers, former host of CBC Radio One’s The Next Chapter

“A book that probes and explores and resists, by a poet, feminist, academic, wise woman who asks hard questions about the world we live in and our place within it. There are no easy answers and if we, the reader, follow the genre-bending trail she makes for us, if we open our hearts, we can absorb the knowledge she has gained by tracing her own lineage and the mythologies that speak to her. In the deeply contemplative writing Neilsen Glenn so generously offers us, this is one of those rare books a reader can linger over and return to.”
–Sheree Fitch, OC, author of You Won’t Always Be This Sad

“Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s The Old Moon in Her Arms delves into the knotty complexities that make up a life—her parents’ fraught marriage, a loss that finds her splayed across the hood of a car, an aging mother who wants her hair cut off—yet laughter simmers just below the surface. The past is offered up in fragments that become, in Neilsen Glenn’s hands, rich and layered poems. This is a book of light.”
–Anne Simpson, Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award–winning author of Speechless


“Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s memoir The Old Moon in Her Arms is a beautiful and profound reverie on a life spent hungering for understanding, meaning, and connection. In lyrical prose, Neilsen-Glenn revisits her roles—daughter, mother, writer, teacher, wife, sister, friend—to reflect on what matters most. This is a brutally honest and emotionally transcendent memoir from the liminal place of advancing age. In a youth-obsessed world, it feels refreshingly real and important.”
–Pauline Dakin, award-winning author of Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood


“We think back through our mothers if we are women,” wrote Virginia Woolf, and in this thinking-back book, Lorri Neilsen Glenn reaches skyward and seaward to parse her peripatetic feminist life, guided by her own curiosity about the women she became along the way to now. Looking forward is an acrobatic art, and Neilsen Glenn finds a future by setting the past in her sights. The Old Moon in Her Arms “gets the goddamned work done” with light and fire.
–Tanis MacDonald, author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female