Description: James Crews, editor of the best-selling How to Love the World (70,000 copies in print), presents an all-new anthology of poems that explore the theme of kindness, featuring more than 100 uplifting and accessible poems by a diverse group of well-known and emerging contemporary poets, including Julia Alvarez, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Danusha Lameris, Alberto Ríos, and more.
Brief description: Danusha Laméris is the author of two books: The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize, and Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh, 2020), which won the Northern California Book Award. Winner of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, she teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA Program and co-hosts with James Crews the Poetry of Resilience online seminars. She lives in Santa Cruz County, California.
Review Quotes: "Our world desperately needs poems that help us come home to loving presence. You have in your hands an anthology with poems that directly nourish the spirit." -- Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance
"This collection of poetry is soul food worthy of savoring. Each poem is a feast unto itself, delivering nourishment for the heart's greatest tenacity and generosity - so needed in our individual and collective lives. It is a banquet of blessings to which I will return often. Thank you." -- Kristi Nelson, Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living and author of Wake Up Grateful "The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy is the book we all need right now to help guide us during this crazy time in living our lives with more kindness, compassion and joy." -- Georgia Heard, author of A Field Guide to the Heart: Poems of Love, Comfort, and Hope"The Path to Kindness is an anthology I've been seeking since I learned to read. To enter its pages is to enter a refuge, a sanctuary where the religion is tenderness and every voice encountered wears its heart on its sleeve. James Crews has curated these poems with exquisite care: the delicate threads linking each to the next weave the whole into a multivoiced spell that leaves the reader both broken open and deeply healed at once. This is a return of poetry to it's sacred place as a song of prayer to the best in us, a song of grief for the lost in us, a song to awaken the possible in us. And ultimately, The Path to Kindness is a song that carries us beyond ourselves into the ways we touch each other's lives, nameable only in poems such as these." -- Kim Rosen, author of Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words "Is kindness a quaint, ineffectual virtue? For poet and editor James Crews, the answer is a resounding no. As he demonstrates throughout "The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy," a follow-up collection to his bestselling anthology "How to Love the World," kindness can be life-altering. It may also help people find a way forward during the most difficult days." -- Christian Science Monitor