Note: This anthology contains my poem, "Bird Collides with Window," so take this review with as big of a grain of salt as you want.

A small stone is a short piece of writing that vividly captures a moment or reveals something beautiful in an everyday event. This anthology is a compilation of such small stones from the editor's e-zine, A Handful of Stones.

Divided into three sections, the first section is an essay that presents a theoretical look at what small stones are and gives insight into how the editors selected the poems that appear in this book. Kasipalita explains that in each small stone, they were looking for Truth, Beauty, Love, and Freshness and explains how they define these generalized terms. It was an interesting essay, which I rather enjoyed reading and works well as an introduction.

The second section is made up of the poems in a variety of forms, from a single line capturing a moment to haiku to bits of evocative prose. The tone ranges from tend to humorous to wistful and everything in between. While I didn't connect with every poem, many showed just how just a few of the right words can vividly evoke an encounter or make you look at an everyday object in a whole new way — a plastic bag in the wind, water in a dirty gutter, an insect — and see them as beautiful.

The final section of the book is a brief introduction to writing small stones over the course of seven days. It has some good ideas in there, but was perhaps too brief and might have benefited from a bit more development. I suppose it would be useful to those new to form, however.

Overall, I'd say this is a wonderful little book, one of which I am pleased and proud to be a part. ( )