Adelle Foley is a retirement administrator, an arts activist, and a writer of haiku. She is on the board of Poetry Flash and PEN Oakland. Her column, “High Street Neighborhood News,” appears monthly in The MacArthur Metro. Her poems have appeared in various magazines, in the textbooks, An Introduction to Poetry and Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, and in Columbia University Press’s internet database, the Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry. Foley’s readings often include her husband, poet Jack Foley. Along the Bloodline is her first collection.
       

Along the Bloodline

Beat poet Michael McClure has said that “Adelle Foley’s haikus show us humanity. Their vitality and imagination shine from her compassion; from seeing things as they truly are.” Dana Gioia, poet and recent chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, has said, “Adelle Foley has taken the miniature form of the haiku and used it as the building block to create short lyric sequences of evocative power and memorability.”  And poet Leza Lowitz asserts that “In Along the Bloodline, Adelle Foley transplants the 16th-century Japanese haiku form to 21st-century America with grace and humanism”: The beauties of haiku, rooted in nature and human nature, the juxtaposition of dissimilar elements, the capture of a moment of awareness or epiphany, are found here in refreshing, startling ways. Foley honors the “bloodlines” of the form while making it very much her own, and we’re all the richer for it. Basho’s spirit is alive and well, spinning out verses in Oakland. 
From Along the Bloodline:

It’s not that I write
Because of what I see. I
See because I write.