Description: "This collection of poems grapples with the collision between spirit and nature, violence and peace, memory and memory loss, and the legacy of mothers and grandmothers"--
Brief description: Sarah M. Wells is the author of The Family Bible Devotional, Pruning Burning Bushes, The Valley of Achor, and Acquiesce. Six of her essays have been listed as Notable Essays in The Best American Essays. She is a 2018 recipient of an Ohio Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Ashland University
Review Quotes:
"From gun violence, miscarriage, and memory loss, to 'popping stars like bubble wrap' and receiving a kiss from a misbehaved dog, Between the Heron and the Moss abounds with surprises that lift and break the heart. Wells draws upon the richness of family history, scripture, and the natural world to offer up poems that that 'catch the sun, ' sprout vines, and wind themselves around her fingers, cultivated, loved, and offered up as a gift to us." -Tania Runyan, Author, Second Sky and What Will Soon Take Place
"Sarah Wells' poetry springs from necessity; to embrace the spirit, to praise; the emotion is true, whether she is writing about nature or the personal. Her distilled poetry is welcomed in this uncertain time." -Michael Miller, Author, Entering the Day
"Between the Heron and the Moss is a modern spiritual woman's rendering of the natural world that Hopkin's poetry embraces: a world so infused by the spirit and grandeur of God that even the silhouette of a heron on a stick, the waxen leaf of a mayapple, or the seeds of sugar snap peas bear brilliant bursts of light, joy and redemption to those who seek to see. Wells beautifully melds the secular and the non-secular, the divine and the human, as she explores what tethers and frees the questing heart." -Kathryn Winograd, Author, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children