being from being broke open by Marcia Casey

In a childhood in which home was alienation and woods were haven, the natural world – trees, birds, seasons, water, mud – offered up the language with which the poems in being from being broke open navigate the crucial questions of being human: Beyond family, where do we belong? Who are we? How do we live? In each poem, sensory experience opens, petal by petal, to reveal inherent depth and meaning. Yet each clinched circle of understanding inevitably ruptures when new experiences shake us up – or break us. These poems tacitly ask whether it is only when each of us – amid brokenness, in grief, and offering each other our “salve love” – works to see, feel, and articulate each new experience, that we create the “sheaf of small fidelities” by which what we live comes to “matter” and the world as a whole “come(s) true.”

Advance praise:

With this book I can see it: Poetry’s destiny is here realized in the visceral apprehension of light and water, sensation and vital being. It takes these poems to break open my fossil solitudes and bring me living into the realm of wild being…by the ‘anchor of abandon.’ Human feeling is given structure, deftly hewn, and inevitable loss given ritual, so fragments may heal.

—Kim Stafford, author of As the Sky Begins to Change

This collection of poems moved me more than any I have read. Immersed in its simple and profound lines, I begin to understand at a deep level many things at once: what it is like to be a sea anemone, the vast power of the ocean, and the sorrow and love that penetrate our lives. These poems will break open not only the wild world of the anemone, but the equally unfathomable human heart. I am a better human being, having read this book.

—Susan Marsh, poet and author of This Earth Has Been Too Generous and Passings

Available from: Amazon, Ingram Books, and Finishing Line Press
ISBN: 979-8-89990-136-2