Overview

An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying. At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny's seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. ""I have come here for their peace and instructions,"" she writes, listening to the willows, the ""slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter."" What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature's many lively colors-the ""burnt orange"" of foxes, ""cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,"" white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world's harsher elements-a dark bog's purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life's constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. ""Why not,"" she asks, ""believe it matters? Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.

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9781639550920

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Reviews

"Praise for Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today""Kwasny has a rare lyric intelligence that can illuminate the most complexly layered quest for understanding without attempting to simplify its parts. These poems never shrink from the most intricate and difficult questions that we, as humans, face.""―Rusty Morrison, author of Whethering and After Urgency ""Kwasny gives us here the book our age most desperately needs―not only a book that searches through the self for all the ancestors, all the dead, which makes of violence not despair but threshold to radical repair―a book that asks what is the soul. And the soul is no possession. It is instead what we are possessed by―and soul isn't one thing, but all things, everything, from the herd of mule-deer wary at our own presence, to the soil that bears the plants that bear the seeds the goldfinches feed on, and yes, the soul is those goldfinches, too.""―Dan Beachy-Quick, author of The Thinking Root ""I can't shake the feeling that this work is haunted by the spirits of the living earth. Revelatory and resplendent, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today is an altar to a higher vision, an elegant meditation fastened to both the inconceivable and the conceivable, the immortal and the material world.""―Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red Praise for Pictograph""In Melissa Kwasny's Pictograph each prose poem is a compass that locates us within intimate natural details up close, never blurring the emotional optics of acute revelations. These praise songs turn a keen eye to the elemental made spiritual--the gift of breathtaking focus.""--Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks""These poems have brought me to my knees, a new catechism founded on the breath of ochre and stone. Among the careful script of the ancients, Melissa Kwasny's vision has superbly located what it means to be human. What it means to seek answers, to mark the passage of time, and to leave behind remnants of hope for those to come. Through these poems of cosmic examination, we are reminded again and again that we were here. And we remain.""--M.L. Smoker, author of Another Attempt at Rescue""Part elegy, part ontological meditation, part fierce celebration of nature's relentless evanescence, these luminously stunning poems interrogate what it means to be human--the profound yearning and profound spirituality of both human observation and human expression.""--Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 Praise for Earth Recitals""In the pages of this extraordinary collection of essays you will encounter a marvelously complex weave of ideas, yet, miracle of miracles, expressed without any jargon or fashionably obfuscating language. Kwasny walks on a winding path through literary history, with an eye to relevant and surrounding events, social and political histories and issues, always with a keen interest in the nature not only of poetry and prose but of human emotion, intelligence and perception. With a compelling mix of distance and empathy, for instance, she explores the fate of birds in warfare, juxtaposing this with the great Persian epic poem, The Conference of the Birds, the myth of Icarus, and lines by the late poet, George Oppen, that express wonder at 'The wild deer bedding down / That they are there!' Similarly this collection does what all the greatest critical works do, leads us to question not only what literature is and who we are but to wonder at existence.""―Susan Griffin, author of Bending Home ""Melissa Kwasny's Earth Recitals is a profound meditation on vision as both a dimension of art and a spiritual practice. What is it to see? What is it to create an image? What is it to live in a way that opens the heart and the mind to vision? Kwasny explores these questions through lyrical responses to a range of artists and writers, from the anonymous makers of ancient rock paintings to Morris Graves, from H.D. to Leslie Marmon Silko, among many others. This beautifully written book expresses in every sentence the life of care and vision it does so much to illuminate.""―Robert Baker, author of The Extravagant Praise for The Nine Senses""Morphing, fleet, intricately paced, register-stretching, comfortable in myriad modes of discourse . . . A quietly magnificent collection of prose poems that can be read as luminous, rill-fresh engagements with Sufi scholar Henry Corbin's question: Not 'what' but 'who' is the earth?""--Orion""These poems are exceptional for their crisp movement, their clarity, their stunningly original images, and their intimate humanity. To read them is to enter a sensibility so finely tuned that each moment of the experience is achingly real, as though time had slowed and allowed your perceptual apparatus to catch up, as though at last you had been given more life, and new eyes with which to see it. The Nine Senses is a startling and wonderful book.""--Christopher Howell, author of Gaze""In The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny follows the path of amor mundi beyond the 'senses five, ' never parting the real from the dreamt, the dead from the living, the lost from the loved, the solitary from the communal. As with my favorite words, rooms, faces, and flowers, I feel that light is sewn up into these poems. Kwasny has written us a book of charms, in the old sense. A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.""--Sarah Gridley, author of Loon"

Praise for The Cloud Path “Expletives and hallelujahs rose from heart to mouth in equal measure as I read these lush, wise poems that grieve both a dead mother and a dying Mother Earth. A meditation on aging in a fragile global moment, Kwasny’s The Cloud Path is essential reading for anyone who cares about our planet and its inhabitants, for those enduring loss, for those who value the creaturely as well as the eternal. And for writers, well, this book is a transcendent how-to, a guide and a treasure to read alongside contemporary literary naturalists such as Terri Tempest Williams, Camille Dungy, and Kerri ní Dochartaigh.”—Kathy Fagan, author of Bad Hobby “‘Quiet is different than silence, the latter more potent, / more mature,’ Melissa Kwasny writes late in this book of expertly managed and captivating poems, the surest of her career. By then we know the subjects of The Cloud Path: the bereavement of a daughter who walks with her mother’s memory; the adjustment of a lesbian couple to a country town where ‘the villagers, with their upper hand, are dangerous’; and an everyday animism in nature where ‘the fact is, consciousness matters; matter knows it.’ The thinking is dynamic, oblique, and agile in these poems of deep stillness, of conviction: ‘Given my disposition, I will live in one place, / not trembling like the aspen, but swaying / like the heavy spruce, troubled by forces larger than me.’ The concerns and grief that stir so many of us move through this poet like she is their instrument. She transmutes their power. ‘It is not silence without my lost ones in it.’”—Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies “Melissa Kwasny writes the poetry I want to read as the world ends. Complicating the boundaries between love and grief, abundance and scarcity, these stunning poems help us navigate our shared twenty-first century catastrophes. Despite her skepticism (or because of it), Kwasny’s ‘faith in the intellectual supremacy / of earth’ gives her the courage to linger on life’s difficult truths. She reports back to us in a sparkling syntax and breathtaking clarity that only deepens our gratitude for what the earth provides, then takes away. ‘Redeemed by proximity to these last of religious signs,’ Kwasny writes, ‘if I believed in priests, I would confess to the pines.’”—Rob Schlegel, author of In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps Praise for Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today “Kwasny has a rare lyric intelligence that can illuminate the most complexly layered quest for understanding without attempting to simplify its parts. These poems never shrink from the most intricate and difficult questions that we, as humans, face.”―Rusty Morrison, author of Whethering and After Urgency “Kwasny gives us here the book our age most desperately needs―not only a book that searches through the self for all the ancestors, all the dead, which makes of violence not despair but threshold to radical repair―a book that asks what is the soul. And the soul is no possession. It is instead what we are possessed by―and soul isn't one thing, but all things, everything, from the herd of mule-deer wary at our own presence, to the soil that bears the plants that bear the seeds the goldfinches feed on, and yes, the soul is those goldfinches, too.”―Dan Beachy-Quick, author of The Thinking Root “I can't shake the feeling that this work is haunted by the spirits of the living earth. Revelatory and resplendent, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today is an altar to a higher vision, an elegant meditation fastened to both the inconceivable and the conceivable, the immortal and the material world.”―Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red Praise for Pictograph  “In Melissa Kwasny’s Pictograph each prose poem is a compass that locates us within intimate natural details up close, never blurring the emotional optics of acute revelations. These praise songs turn a keen eye to the elemental made spiritual—the gift of breathtaking focus.”—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of The Emperor of Water Clocks “These poems have brought me to my knees, a new catechism founded on the breath of ochre and stone. Among the careful script of the ancients, Melissa Kwasny’s vision has superbly located what it means to be human. What it means to seek answers, to mark the passage of time, and to leave behind remnants of hope for those to come. Through these poems of cosmic examination, we are reminded again and again that we were here. And we remain.”—M.L. Smoker, author of Another Attempt at Rescue “Part elegy, part ontological meditation, part fierce celebration of nature’s relentless evanescence, these luminously stunning poems interrogate what it means to be human—the profound yearning and profound spirituality of both human observation and human expression.”—Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 Praise for Earth Recitals  “In the pages of this extraordinary collection of essays you will encounter a marvelously complex weave of ideas, yet, miracle of miracles, expressed without any jargon or fashionably obfuscating language. Kwasny walks on a winding path through literary history, with an eye to relevant and surrounding events, social and political histories and issues, always with a keen interest in the nature not only of poetry and prose but of human emotion, intelligence and perception. With a compelling mix of distance and empathy, for instance, she explores the fate of birds in warfare, juxtaposing this with the great Persian epic poem, The Conference of the Birds, the myth of Icarus, and lines by the late poet, George Oppen, that express wonder at ‘The wild deer bedding down / That they are there!’ Similarly this collection does what all the greatest critical works do, leads us to question not only what literature is and who we are but to wonder at existence.”―Susan Griffin, author of Bending Home “Melissa Kwasny's Earth Recitals is a profound meditation on vision as both a dimension of art and a spiritual practice. What is it to see? What is it to create an image? What is it to live in a way that opens the heart and the mind to vision? Kwasny explores these questions through lyrical responses to a range of artists and writers, from the anonymous makers of ancient rock paintings to Morris Graves, from H.D. to Leslie Marmon Silko, among many others. This beautifully written book expresses in every sentence the life of care and vision it does so much to illuminate.”―Robert Baker, author of The Extravagant Praise for The Nine Senses  “Morphing, fleet, intricately paced, register-stretching, comfortable in myriad modes of discourse . . . A quietly magnificent collection of prose poems that can be read as luminous, rill-fresh engagements with Sufi scholar Henry Corbin’s question: Not ‘what’ but ‘who’ is the earth?”—Orion “These poems are exceptional for their crisp movement, their clarity, their stunningly original images, and their intimate humanity. To read them is to enter a sensibility so finely tuned that each moment of the experience is achingly real, as though time had slowed and allowed your perceptual apparatus to catch up, as though at last you had been given more life, and new eyes with which to see it. The Nine Senses is a startling and wonderful book.”—Christopher Howell, author of Gaze “In The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny follows the path of amor mundi beyond the ‘senses five,’ never parting the real from the dreamt, the dead from the living, the lost from the loved, the solitary from the communal. As with my favorite words, rooms, faces, and flowers, I feel that light is sewn up into these poems. Kwasny has written us a book of charms, in the old sense. A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.”—Sarah Gridley, author of Loon

Author Information

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph,andThe Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America's 2008 Cecil Hemly Award. A portion ofPictographreceived the Alice FayDi Castagnola Award, judged by Ed Roberson. Kwasny is also the author ofEarth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision,and has edited multiple anthologies, includingToward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 18001950and, with M.L. Smoker,I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights.Widely published in journals and anthologies, her work has appeared inPloughshares,Boston Review, andThe Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral.She lives outside of Jefferson City, Montana, in the Elkhorn Mountains.

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