John Nichols author of The Milagro Beanfield War and The Voice of the Butterfly Mary Sojourner is tough, she's funny, she's full of wisdom, a fine outrage, and lots of hope. She sees the world as it is, heartbreaking and alive. Delicate is an inspiration.

Terry Tempest Williams author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place The subjects of these stories are anything but delicate. Not the women, "big and fierce and truly blonde," not the HIV, the cancer, the tattoos, or the estrogen, not the roadkill or the nine-thousand-year-old man in beads, not the politics that have oozed into these stories under pressure in a place where "fighting is like the weather." What is delicate is the way Sojourner has connected her subjects to place, the desert Southwest; the feel of cilantro on tongues; warm water on wrists.

Linda Hasselstrom, editor of Woven on the Wind: Women Write About Friendship in the Sagebrush West I've not found a writer who captures the emotions and reality of aging women -- in all its confusion and glory -- as does Mary Sojourner.

Terry Tempest Williams Mary Sojourner is a warrior in the cause of expanding women's passion beyond delicate, beyond fifty years of age.