Better With Friends
Rank Stranger Press (2009)
$14.00 (plus $2.50 S & H)

send check for $16.50, your mailing address, and any instructions for personalization to:

Helen Losse
2569 Wood Valley Road
Winston-Salem, NC 27106

All copies will be signed.

Better With Friends is a book of poetry that explores the intersections of memory (factual and embellished), dreams (daydreams and night dreams), reverie, and prayer, so that all of one’s thoughts can be envisioned as prayer. Although the book has strong spiritual overtones, it is not a religious book nor a book of poetic devotions. The events that serve as story in the poems make possible a life in which one can “pray without ceasing” (II Thessalonians 5:17) through the bad and the good.

Now also available at amazon.com

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Praise for Better With Friends

“I moved like a poet—laboring—/under the weight of the burden of truth,” Helen Losse declares in the first poem from Better With Friends.  A poet does indeed labor, but in a poem, what is the truth?  Losse shows us the unrelenting details of decline and death,… but these details are not the only “truth”… in this collection.  How does the spirit shine through the labors of time?  How does [one’s] soul dance with the world given to us—family, friends, suffering, pleasure?  Losse shows us how in these poems, rich as they are in the details that embody our lives.  This is indeed the poet’s labor brought to fruition.

—Kathryn Stripling Byer, NC Poet Laureate and author of Wildwood Flower and Coming to Rest

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Putting things right, in all the possible meanings of that phrase, is what these poems are about, making order of memory, loss and injustice, making restitution, reparation, describing with evocative precision the emotional details that make a life.  Would that we all could move more like this poet.

—Scott Owens, author of The Fractured World

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By striving to understand the complexities and scope of social injustice, memory, faith and loss, and seeking equilibrium and hope through understanding within a world that is often disconnected, Losse has written a meditative book with poems that stand on their own yet connect, ultimately, to a prayer that “we might gather humanity together.”

—Jessie Carty, author of At the A & P Meridiem

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$7.00 (plus shipping and handling)

Available from

FootHills Publishing (2004)

PO Box 68
Kanona, NY 14856
(607) 566-3881

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$9.00 (plus shipping and handling)

Available from

Southern Hum Press (2006)

5936 16th St.
Lubbock, TX 79416

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Kaleidoscope World (self-published) here