Hiraeth Press is proud to announce the release of our newest title: Western Solstice by Leonore Wilson. As of now Western Solstice is available exclusively through the Hiraeth Press website but will be making its way into various online retailers shortly. Check it out in the bookstore to order a copy or read an excerpt. It’s perfect reading for the longest day of the year.
Advanced Reviews for Western Solstice
“Leonore Wilson’s Western Solstice contains poems that spring whole and marvelous, shimmering from the earth. Born from a profound, wide-ranging, original and feminine mind, they bewitch the reader with a lush, passionate voice that is ‘all impulse of towards’ and a tensile form that is as breathtaking as its content. This book is a true treasure.” —Cathy Colman, author of Borrowed Dress and Beauty’s Tattoo
“Shimmering up and down the original Tree, nature, Western Solstice is a gnosis that explores intense sensual vividness, being, and the flesh through the terrestrial details of a large and generous human empathy. Political, fierce, and tender, Leonore Wilson’s poems take ‘cadence inside herself,’ and ‘anti-matter and matter flagellating, palpitating’ into mysteries of life and death, female presence, the planet, gender, and music. Her process is transformative; the reader’s experience is deliciousness, Gaia, sweet substance, ’Eden to the wasp, shelter and elixir’: like eating ‘Billy Holliday’s limbering voice’; like ’consummating fallen darkness and diffused and fascinating’; or, like ‘being fed clear to the core, and distance bent backwards’—chords of an embodying, gorgeous, and intimate art.” —‘Annah Sobelman, author of In the Bee Latitudes and The Tulip Sacrament
“Milk of cathedrals, Edens of wasps—Leonore Wilson’s poems, set in the ‘lovely California golden-boast of stubbornness’ that she knows so well and loves so much, chart the wanderings of forests, the thought-dreams of snakes, the bright and difficult births of souls and poems and gorgeous worldly heavens. These are wise, intricate and beautiful poems. Read them and become more human.” —Joe Ahearn, James Michener Fellow and editor of Bat Terrier
“Jane Kenyon talked about how the best poetry seems to ‘body forth’ from the poet, andWestern Solstice demonstrates this premise. Leonore Wilson’s poems are meditative and deeply felt, but they reach outward rather than inward. These poems sing themselves from body and soul into the world. I have long admired Wilson`s poetry. I find her work to be transcendent, and I am glad for this book with its authentic thought and language that is radiant, redeemable and true.” —Gary Short, Stegner Fellow and author of 10 Poems and 13 Horses, Flying Over Sonny Liston, and Theory of Twilight