The Taste of Water and Stone is a deer trail through the last decade of Kirkey’s poetry. Along its course, it charts a way through mountains, forests, and estuaries, through personal transformations and mythic encounters. The selected works have been revisited and revised to stand comfortably alongside a new cycle of poems. The result is a collection in answer to and enactment of the question, “how do we rewild the human heart?”
“In this haunting hymn to the earth, Kirkey wades into the rich intersection of the internal and wild landscape. His voice carries into the next generation a reverence for the land begun by Gary Snyder and Barry Lopez.”
—L.M. Browning, author of Ruminations at Twilight
“‘Burning,’ ‘Thirsty,’ ‘Shaky,’ ‘Uncertain.’ These are just a few of the descriptors I have heard from people about how it feels to them to be living in and through these strange times on the planet. The challenge, strain, and suffering to human systems, ecosystems, and psyches is linked. And then comes Jason Kirkey’s The Taste of Water and Stone. Through a finely-curated selection of poems, Kirkey offers a curative; a way of re-humanizing the individual within the mesh of high-velocity modernity. He does so by turning to what is close-at-hand: the heart, the breath, the senses waking back up, and guides us to a more ancient backdrop that has not forsaken us – nature and the perennial tradition of human naturalness that is cultivated from the practice of such connecting. Eco-poetry at its best.”
—Saizan Owen, author of The School of Soft-Attention, purelandpoetry.com
“Here are the tender heartsongs of a man whose contemplative mind begins in the soles of his feet and rises upward like a wildfire, whose appetite and appreciation for every living thing will not be quelled. Page after page, Kirkey boldly opens his heart toward the world and invites us to do the same, suffering and savoring all the richly complex consequences of that vulnerable stance where the shields have all fallen away…” —Timothy P. McLaughlin, author of Rooted and Risen
