New Collection About To Go to Print

I’m thrilled with the cover art and kind comments re: my new book, The Resonance Around Us, coming out later this month from Mountains and Rivers Press (Eugene, Oregon). I’m grateful to the publisher, Ce Rosenow, for the joys of working with her on this collection, to Jonathan Greene, book designer extraordinaire, and to Dobree Adams, photographer who took this gorgeous photo specifically for the book,  echoing the images in the title poem, below:

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The Resonance Around Us

As we walk through this field, coarse grasses vibrate around our ankles. Listen, we are already in the sky, its rising glissando trembling in the hollows of our bones—our bones that might be wind chimes hanging from the trees, clattering like a hard rain.

Tonight it will snow, each crystal a tuning fork for the other, each of our upturned faces echoing the quiet ticking flakes that home on us.

Even those things we deem silent—dead weeds nodding by the barn, the piles the horses drop as they drift through the pasture, steam rising from each before it cools—even these are singing in their spheres.

Listen, and you might hear the choir of atoms, those unseen constellations that make flesh, flickering on and off as they resonate with the dead who float beside us, their substance oscillating faster than we apprehend.

Just now some bird that knows the notes of twilight opened its beak to offer a brief harmony, and as the dark descends in solemn chords, a chorus of plum clouds begins to hum on Earth’s horizon.

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I am trying to figure out how to insert the cover image in a large enough format that you can read the comments on the back. I’m very grateful to Terry Ann Carter and Charlotte Mandel for their more than kind comments about my work. Hopefully, I’ll figure out how to do that soon.

The collection is in two parts. The first section, “The Resonance Around Us,” consists of  free verse poems, while the second section, “The Great Blue”contains haibun. As soon as the book goes to print, the Ce will post it on the press web site, along with ordering information.

I’m hoping to arrange a couple of readings to launch the book, either here in South Jersey, or even up north. Have book, will travel ;).