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A Family Affair, a poetry collection by Ruth Naylor, is scheduled to release this fall with Finishing Line Press. Although this chapbook's subject matter is Naylor's own family relationships, in many ways, these poems express a universal experience.

"With these poems Naylor illuminates the complicated terrain of family life.Her courageous telling invites us to bend with her as she kneels down "tocheck what life had done" and to see how a "spine straight as Biblical law"
can soften in response to need and love. This collection holds our commonache for the other."
-Jean Janzen, author of Paper House and Entering the Wild

"Ruth Naylor's alert and graceful poems testify to her long immersion in thedifficult beauty of human love. 'I do not understand / How love can dwell soclose to hurt, she writes in a typically honest and unsentimental moment.
Yet her tracing of this and other mysteries of family relations reminds usthat through all the pains and betrayals of life, love does indeed persist.A Family Affair is a gift to us all."
-Jeff Gundy, author of Spoken among the Trees

"This collection reads like a memoir compressed into the most essential
moments of a life and told through the clear eyes of a grandmother. Ruth
Naylor's reminiscences do not drift into nostalgia or sentimentality but
follow the plain speech of her Quaker background, the compassion of her call
to be a Mennonite pastor, and the discernment of her work as a spiritual
director."
-Julia Spicher Kasdorf, author of Poetry in America

"In these poems Ruth Naylor holds her own experience in the light. She does
not avoid the pain of loss and separation in her life, and she ponders 'how
love can dwell so close to hurt....' In reading her poems about family, we
can see our own family experience in a new light."
-Richard A. Kauffman, book review editor, Christian Century