Overview

"Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's soul was shaped by deep impressions made on her by India, where she lived for two years in the 1960s. It was there the Goddess claimed her. It was there that myths began singing to her. It was there her soul remembered other lives. It was there her stars insisted she learn to tend her fire. And the fire spoke: I am the heat of your passion. It is I who will show you your way. What to do on her return to America but become a Jungian, and a poet?Lowinsky won the synkroniciti magazine ""Space"" prize, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also won the Blue Light Poetry Prize, the Obama Millennial Award and is an International Merit Award Winner in the Atlanta Review 2020 Poetry contest. Your Face in the Fire is her sixth poetry collection.Lowinsky is a Jungian Analyst, a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute, and poetry editor for Psychological Perspectives. She has led a poetry workshop, Deep River, for many years at the San Francisco Jung Institute and co-edited an anthology of poems by its participants, Soul Making in the Valley of the Shadow. She blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com. ""To read this book is to drink of a rare and holy elixir: an exuberant, deeply soulful life masterfully distilled into word music. If you read slowly and are lucky, you might fall into the alchemical vat with her, where your own life begins to crackle and shimmer in her light. In previous works, Naomi gorgeously, fearlessly answered the call of the ancestors to remember, to grieve, to embody, and to reclaim the pearls of grace left in the ruins of exile and shattered dreams. Here she sings her own long and inspired life, from starry vault to watery cave, from Zion to California to Mexico, with the same unflinching gaze and eye for beauty, where the goddess is found inside every stone, where even evil and death - including her own - are alchemized to serve as chiaroscuro revealing love's transfigurations over time. Her lamentations are so inseparable from her passionate, sensual exultations that they become the song of life itself, utterly intoxicated with the heartbreaking beauty of existence on Earth in the eyes of the soul. As a result, she writes, Elijah appears at the table: ""Here I am says he/ Here you are."""" - Frances Hatfield, PhD, LMFT, former poetry editor, Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche; author, Rudiments of Flight. ""Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's book of poetry: Your Face in the Fire, speaks with an impassioned voice which opens us up to that vast space which we find in Jung's Red Book. It is a vibrant standpoint from which she encounters the mysteries of the psyche. Through her poetic imagination we get to participate in her vision making process. Nourished by her dreams that invite us to imagine with her as she expresses a life time of creating, engaging, reflecting and reworking while showing us how her process is not only transformational for her, but for anyone who opens up to the reality of their experiences of psyche's being. The archetypal dimension shines through this book."" - Sam Kimbles, Ph.D., author of Phantom Narratives and The Suffering of Ghosts"

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9781421835600

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"(from red clay is talking - first book, 2000)""Shifting, dappled light, interwoven with shadow. The colors of bright detail softened under moonglow. In Naomi Lowinsky's consistent search for the Mother, the meaning of the feminine, we meet the Goddess in her many guises. This is a poetry of quest, and the poet takes us through myriad ages and cultures. We partake with her in ecstasy and darkness, passion, epiphany and hunger, and our world is larger for it.""- Diane di Prima, author of Revolutionary Letters and Loba ""Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's Your Face in the Fire is a journey through the long and productive life of a well-recognized poet, a chariot traveling through timelessness. It is as much autobiographical as it is transcendent and timeless in its relationship to our collective unconscious. Here the reader encounters a goddess book, a mystical book, and a political book that speaks to the soul of all of us who have visited the realm of the dark feminine and the light of our joyous world. The poems speak to the reader and, in turn we speak to ourselves forming reminiscences of our ageless past. The words prompt us to remember the names of our ancestors and experience their living influence on us today: ""Yours is the river of tongues we drink so we may remember."" In Naomi's work we encounter Basho, Thom Gunn, Isis, Sophia and Ruby, the trickster, Don Sandner, her husband Dan, and so many other lustful and holy characters. Poems are Naomi's home where her spirit grows wild. She implores us, through example, to listen to all that calls, welcome the visits from the unrecognized, and dance with the spirits of the depths. In this volume, we recognize and are humbled by our desperate need for the poetic and are in ecstasy as we delve into the inner world of a guide to the oft inaccessible and inexpressible realms of our experience.""- Jeffrey Moulton Benevedes, Former Editor-in-Chief Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche In Grateful Praise of Your Face in the Fire.""Welcome to Naomi Ruth Lowinsky's world: a lamentation, a celebration, an eloquent unearthing of a lifetime's worth of memories and then some - achingly sacred, passionately profane, potently political: a reverential re-assembling, ""from the bottom of life"" on up, of the deepest, darkest, wildest and most ungovernable Feminine, rich root source of us all. I love how this poet of the depths, this dear soul sister, weaves together the sweetness and loneliness of childhood, the hot lure of bad boys and the tender triumph of aging soulmates, the tragic flame out of a town called Paradise, the greedy gutting of our precious Earth, ""the Angel of Sciatica,"" odes to Hillary Clinton and whales and old cars. A bare-footed Elijah appearing, radiant, toasting the grandchildren who will inhabit this strange human future. The depth and grief and joy of Naomi's soul-retrieval lead us to wave our hands in the air-not unlike her third-grade classmates who called out, ""Here!"" to the morning rollcall-to show up for the unabashedly uncontrollable now, each moment indelibly etched in eternity once we rejoin the stars.""- Sharon Heath, author of The Fleur Trilogy and The Mysterious Composition of Tears"

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