taking flight by Norma Bradley

“Bronx-born Norma Bradley creates haibun of prose, and haiku poems, with startling effect. There’s a little of Washington, D.C. Ann Beattie’s simple, direct, nuanced vital everyday life experiences of modern relationships into complex contemporary society, alongside Juneau, Alaskan Lucia Berlin’s undeviatingly unpretentious rhythms and pauses as if spoken with a sense of immediacy and intimacy.”

— Alan Summers, Founder of Call of the the Page & Editor of The Pan Haiku Review

“In Taking Flight, Norma Bradley traces the quiet weight of memory, inheritance, and everyday resilience. Moving through landscapes as varied as Van Cortlandt Park, post-war kitchens, hospital rooms, and artist residencies, these pieces gather lives shaped by migration, silence, rupture, and small acts of care. Whether through a broken barn door or a child’s drawing in a deaf school, Bradley captures what lingers beneath the visible—grief, humour, grit, and grace. This collection resists sentimentality, offering instead clear-eyed reflections anchored in lived experience. A compelling portrait of family, survival, and the many ways we begin again.”

— Vidya Premkumar, Author of frame story

“Taking Flight is yet another breakthrough in Norma Bradley’s memorable work: unflinching attention to the natural world, reverence for family and the working class, the uplifting acknowledgment of the least of these, her insistence that the core of humanity is rooted in compassion and the luminous language that conjures love. Nothing escapes her gaze and wonder. The sacred seasons of the heart, and her holy belief that poetry embodies ‘the rhythms of promise,’ are embedded in every shimmering line of this collection.”

— Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) & Author of Restoring Sacred Art

About the Author:

Norma Bradley, a poet and multimedia visual artist, worked in schools and rehabilitation centers for 30 years as an NC State visiting artist. Her prose, haiku, and haibun have appeared in many noteworthy journals. She received a Touchstone prize for individual poems in 2023 and is the author of the haiku chapbook while the lily blooms (Yavanika Press, 2023). When she is not writing, you might find her painting birds, tending her garden, or climbing the hillsides.