Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven series―one of linked prose poems called "Another Letter to the Soul" and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history. Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in "Another Letter to the Soul" point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series)

Literature & Fiction

Kwasny, Melissa

Poetry

University of Washington Press

Essays on the life of the image and its role in visionary experience through a range of cultural practices focus primarily on poetry but include painting, sculpture, and song. Earth Recitals engages with the image in the history of poetry, as well as with contemporary poets, philosophers, archaeologists, artists, and cultural critics. It outlines the major tenets of Imagism and sketches the transformations the image underwent in modernism and surrealism. The book's central preoccupation is with questions of interiority and exteriority--the image's appearance as being and its subsequent reappearance in the mind--and introduces the writings of the renowned Sufi scholar Henry Corbin.

Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision

Essays & Correspondence

Lynx House Press

Nettie, an elderly woman living in a small town in Indiana, recalls her friend Till, a professional medium who encouraged Nettie's daughter and granddaughter to enter the same field, Marie, an independent Polish immigrant, Art, a spiritual healer of animals, and the other people in her long life

Trees Call for What They Need

Spinsters, Ink

Poetry.New to SPD. These poems capture wonderfully the complex and rich interconnection between the human mind and heart and nature. A moving and beautiful collection -- Susan Griffin. Melissa Kwasny is the author of two novels Modern Daughters and the Outlaw West and Trees Call for What They Need. She makes her home in Montana.

The Archival Birds

Bear Star Press

These thirty-seven poems are eccentric in the true meaning of the word-off-center. Their titles, bearing the names of weeds, flowers, herbs, trees, are merely points of departure. How hard can it be," the poet asks, "to lie down in the green / mussed bed of the senses... In clover." Whether it's clover or rue, aspen or moss, the reader is invited into that rumpled but rich bed." --Maxine KuminAbout the Author(s)Melissa Kwasny is the author of The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press, 2000), and editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800 - 1950 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). She has also published two novels, most recently Trees Call for What They Need. Ms. Kwasny lives in Jefferson City, Montana.

Thistle: Poems

Lost Horse Press

Drawing inspiration from Novalis (1772-1801) a poet who, like the other adherents of early German Romanticism, believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, Kwasny divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditionsindigenous culture, mythology, romanticism, modernism, surrealism, postmodernism, and moreinform daily life. Finding inspiration in the mountain West, Kwasny weaves a shimmering web of connections. Reading Novalis in Montana stretches boundaries with a section of reading poems”poems in dialogue with romantic and modernist poets, including Ezra Pound, H.D., Novalis, Dickinson, as well as a sequence that is a twenty-first century take on The Wasteland,” included with stunning lyric poems. Using luxuriant syntax to string together conditional clauses, these poems throw the reader backward and forward within a line and a poem. Alternatively, repetition offers a commentary on meaning, chopping perception into fragments. Combined with a charming self-qualification that deliberately interrupts momentum, this work smartly ties the reader back down to earth. Throughout details of lived experience emergehiking through the Pacific Northwest, helping a friend deal with cancer, sorting through the ruins of a relationship and yet the interior voice is always tuned to the physical world, envisioning the shared understanding that connects all life.

Reading Novalis in Montana

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

In this groundbreaking fourth collection comprised of exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers. The questions that have informed much of Kwasny’s previous workhow does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined itas resolution of the real and the dream,” Kwasny writes in the title poem. Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?

The Nine Senses

If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home. The poems in this collection emerge from these visits and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that, we make a sign and we receive.” Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.”

Pictograph: Poems

Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear

In Putting on the Dog, Melissa Kwasny explores the age-old relationship between humans and the animals that have provided us with our clothing: leather, wool, silk, feathers, pearls, and fur. From silkworms grown on plantations in Japan and mink farms off Denmark’s western coast to pearl beds in the Sea of Cortés, Kwasny offers firsthand accounts of traditions and manufacturing methods―aboriginal to modern―and descriptions of the marvel and miracle of the clothing itself. What emerges is a fresh look at the cultural history of fashion. Kwasny travels the globe to visit both large-scale industrial manufacturers and community-based, often subsistence production by people who have spent their lives working with animals―farmers, ranchers, tanners, weavers, shepherds, and artisans. She examines historical rates of consumption and efforts to move toward sustainability, all while considering animal welfare, worker safety, environmental health, product accountability, and respect for indigenous knowledge and practice. At its heart, Putting on the Dog demonstrates how what we choose to wear represents one of our most profound engagements with the natural world.

Trinity University Press

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Books by Kwasny, Melissa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kwasny, Melissa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series)

Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision

Trees Call for What They Need

Trees Call for What They Need

The Archival Birds

Thistle: Poems

Reading Novalis in Montana

The Nine Senses

Pictograph: Poems

Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear