These are tender, grave poems and it's as though the poet is encountering everything—a fox, a tunnel, a lily, a sunset—for the first and last time. Allow Me is an eyes-cracked meditation on time, what we do with it, and how it treats us. We must pay attention to the silences between comings and goings, between lines and stanzas and poems; the poems themselves are loud with life and what comes to life from the other side.
~ Michael Kenyon, author of Travellers May Still Return

In Allow Me the past is second-guessed, the present might be bleak and the future tenuous, but the voice in this book is ultimately resilient. These poems have a wicked vein of humour that sparkles unexpectedly, like a shaft of sunlight on deep water: there’s laughter in the dark here.
~ Julie Bruck, author of How to Avoid Huge Ships

These poems are bright, direct, and sure; fully present on every page. Rhonda Batchelor speaks plainly and timelessly, with vivid focus, from a life which gathers the force of its perspective into poetry of wit and beauty.
~ Marilyn Bowering, author of What is Long Past Occurs in Full Light

Rhonda Batchelor has worked in and around publishing, as a writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and consultant, since the 1970s. She and her late husband, the poet Charles Lillard, operated Reference West Press, publishing over 100 chapbooks by some of Canada’s finest writers. The accompanying readings, The Hawthorne Series, ran from 1990 to 2000. Her own poetry titles include Bearings (Brick Books), Interpreting Silence (Beach Holme), and Weather Report (Dundurn Press). She recently retired as a long-time assistant editor of The Malahat Review and lives in Victoria, British Columbia.