Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere travels outward and inward
Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere leads us through mosquito clouds and dusty barns, inviting us to witness flow and change, the endangered and the enduring, the gone and the going away.
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I’m looking for whatever support comes along, earthly and otherworldly
I’m a believer in synchronicity: one sighting begets another — the more you see, the more you get — like these spiraled pearls outside my door just as summer ends, on the cusp of bittersweetness when losses cut deeper in autumn, bleed into the brilliant dying back.
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Moving past sadness and old hopes
I needed a messenger this morning, in the kitchen where my former mate and I had shared meals and talk for 24 years. He had passed 5 days before of a heart attack.
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On the mystery of mothering
This spring, thinning my garden beds overfull with hellebores, the early- and long-blooming Lenten rose, I accidently exposed a rabbit’s nest. It was the first I’d ever seen. I gently pulled back the top layer of gray fluff — then the scream. A humanlike scream of innermost fear.
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Dialogues with nature in a time of pandemic
Though we fight every step up and out, we ascend by sheer muscle of will, purpose, and service. The convergence is with our highest and best self. The blade of change slices our tender middle; we smooth the jaggedness of some force we didn’t see coming.
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Poet Jesse Graves discusses his fourth collection, Merciful Days
In haunting lyric poems and traditional narratives, Jesse Graves’ Merciful Days shows us the ‘ghost-lives’ that shaped the boy learning the rough language of cows and that imprint the returning adult who walks the fence line now without his father. Graves talks with Chapter 16 about the experiences and influences that inform his work.
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