These poems offer wisdom from a voice that speaks the language of humanity at its very best, at its most creative, attentive, and responsive. And in Dervish Lions, Tiel Aisha Ansari offers a vision that recognizes humanity's painful complexities, our capacity for both redemptive goodness and corrosive malice, while taking us to sacred places in the Pacific Northwest and around the world - Willamette, Wy'east, Vanport, Hanford, Cedar Mesa, Mosier, the Steens, Tanzania, Gdansk, Kilimanjaro, Milarepa, and Alamagordo.

-from the foreword by Paulann Petersen