"I opened the door and walked into this collection of poetry, immediately moved, and deeply connected to Crane’s pureness of observation through the stunning simplicity of her words. Her poems are in part a lullaby to the earth, both existential and paradoxical. Simultaneously, we are fragile and mighty, joyful and sorrowful, consumed with hope and hopelessness. Cradled in the arms of nature she hints at past lovers, imbibes the elements of the earth, her “dinner of rain,” and carries us into the impermanence of our changing world, all recognized in flashing snapshots of time. Lastly, she takes us out of the woods, and into her worldly travels navigating countries and continents with poetic flare where singular moments run the gamut from exotic to political. No matter how far she roams, Crane takes a deep dive into life and treats us to gorgeous places."

– Monica Devine, author of Water Mask

In Mary Eliza Crane's new collection, Last Call of the Dark, twin themes of vulnerability to the human impulse to destroy plus her resulting alienation weave through the poems. With no God for solace, she returns again and again to the natural world, animate an inanimate, for refuge. "I take comfort from a body assembled/out of microbes...an ecosystem singing from my mouth," she declares in the opening poem, "Dry Grass," one of the finest in the book. The music of her best poems, tight, rhythmic constructions dense with the naming of things —"salmon berry," "Indian plumb," "bleeding heart," "tiger lily," "woodpecker drumming dead oak for a mate" — hums and buzzes with life. These are brave poems by a brave poet, celebrations at the edge of the abyss.

—Peter Ludwin, author of An Altar of Tides and Gone to Gold Mountain