Strange Bird
2021 Reflected in Poems
Cyra Sweet Dumitru
March 2022
48 Pages, Trade Paper
List Price US $7.00
ISBN 978-0-9725562-5-5
2021 was a year of lightning strikes…for us as a nation, for the state of Texas, and for me personally. I wanted to keep my heart open even as circumstances held new ways to break it. I wanted to keep breathing fully. Through writing these poems, I processed my shock and grief, and attempted to minimize my growing feelings of disorientation and numbness. Through writing these poems, I sought to balance shock and grief mindfully with images of beauty, reflections of gratitude.
Horizons of Joy:
Poetic Thresholds for Winter
Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill
Oct. 2021
108 Pages, Trade Paper
List Price US $17.99
ISBN 978-0-9725562-4-8
Horizons of Joy: Poetic Thresholds for Winter offers a guide for navigating the stark seasons we each go through. This collection invites us to take a time out, to enjoy the days shortening and the nights deepening, as we move through our annual cycle of grieving the old and welcoming the new. As this is often a time in which we wrestle with meaning, this collection also encourages intentionality, in the choosing and using of not only traditionally seasonal words, like tidings and mistletoe, but also their common work-a-day counterparts, like stillness and yearning.
Rooted in the deep stories of twenty-eight total words associated with the winter season, this book moves beyond the promise of its title, by taking readers on a spiritual quest encompassing everything from Beowulf and wintercearig (winter sorrow) to the Beatles and Santana. In an innovative blend of poetry, meditation, history, and etymology, the book invites readers to revisit and explore cherished but worn assumptions about not just winter itself but the season's multitude of connotations and trappings. In addition, Horizon's companion journal, which parallels the book's format, provides meditative writing prompts to explore the numinous power of each word in our daily lives.
Praise for Horizons of Joy:
Mary Lynne Hill has written a book like no other. Her Horizons of Joy: Poetic Thresholds for Winter far exceeds the promise of its title, as this work takes readers on a spiritual pilgrimage encompassing everything from Beowulf and wintercearig (winter sorrow) to the Beatles and Santana. In this inventive blend of poetry, meditation, prompts, history, and formidable linguistic scholarship, Hill invites us to revisit and perhaps revise cherished but worn assumptions about not just winter itself but the season's multitude of connotations and trappings. Ultimately, she performs verbal magic, transforming seemingly commonplace words like stillness or snow into numinous forces capable of changing lives, and for the better. What a gift!
—Carol Coffee Reposa, four-time Fulbright Scholar, member of the Texas Institute of Letters, and 2018 Texas Poet Laureate.
Horizons of Joy:
Poetic Thresholds for Winter –
The Companion Journal
Mary Lynne Gasaway Hill
Oct. 2021
68 Pages, Case Cover
List Price US $15.99
ISBN 978-0-9725562-7-9
Love plays the long game in the dialectic of our becoming. This Companion Journal provides a space for the exploration of that long game through meditative creative prompts, rooted in words and phrases that accompany us as we cross over Winter’s thresholds, whether those thresholds last one evening in the turning of the year, or whether we are held in them for longer stretches of our lives. Words and phrases, like stillness, magi, embers, yearning, and auld lang syne, offer us room to reflect, grow, and flourish in relation to the meanings they carry within us, as the days shorten and the evenings deepen. Enjoy exploring within this journal on its own, or in tandem with its generative collection, Horizons of Joy: Poetic Thresholds for Winter, which also offers the deeps stories of these words along with accompanying poems.