From a Spit Seed

In From a Spit Seed, her sixth poetry collection, Wendell Hawken invites readers to enter her rural world, a northern Shenandoah Valley farm on the edge of the wild, and to marvel with her. These poems' powerful sense of place seen through the rear-view mirror of time, the dawning wisdom of accumulated years, and the author's own "sell-by" date fulfill poetry's ancient role: teaching us how to live.

Here's the opening poem, "Breathe"

What exhale does to glass.

The soft cough that came to stay.

Little thoughts of quiet days-
returning robins, for instance,

tapping code, heads cocked to hear
earth's answer.

Every river's pointing finger.

The flat, webbed feet of platitude.

Belief's seeds winnowed into fact

and myth tied to memory's mast
sailing past the lies that bind.

Readers familiar with Hawken's work will recognize the wry humor and "play it by ear" music of her language and her attention to sound as she walks the fine lines between knowing and not knowing, fact and dream, hope and despair.

As Betty Adcock has said, "Wendell Hawken weaves dense imagery that catches her readers up and wraps us tight while a story pools darkly, beautiful as unfinished fringe, around us."