A Compass for My Bones was published by Main Street Rag Press in 2018.

“In Diana Smith Bolton’s A Compass for My Bones, the past somehow remains radiant, never far off, but present: keenly in focus, complex, and vexed. The poems, formally brilliant, surprise us not with flash and display, but with their subtlety, mystery, and accuracy. Bolton’s voice and vision transfix and entrance.”   ~ Eric Pankey, Augury, Crow-Work, and Trace

“With a clear gaze and distilled writing, Diana Smith Bolton has gifted us with a collection in which the language sings on the page and stirs in the blood. Her clean lines deftly balance between precision and lyricism. She writes, ‘I feel the evening pull my hips, the moon/a compass for my bones.’ This volume showcases a poet expertly steering through past and present, public and private, ‘roots … planted in what is read.'”   ~ Teri Ellen Cross Davis, Haint

“We must steady our hand, so the compass’s needle points North. That’s Part I of Diana Bolton’s aching, ruminative collection—childhood, faith, and identity inflected by landscape. ‘How to get back to you, Barcelona,’ one poem asks, ‘to nineteen years old, to fervent and pious trust?’ We cannot return. So Part II ventures further toward Alice and Ophelia, Queen Liliuokalani and Emily Dickinson. A Compass for My Bones is a lovely, startling collection of journeys.   ~ Sandra Beasley, Count the Waves and I Was the Jukebox