Homespun Alchemy by Julie Martin

“Julie Martin‘s debut poetry collection, Homespun Alchemy, spins together what’s close at hand and what inherent magic we can find in everyday life. Martin celebrates the patterns, possibilities, and passions of the living earth in the very structure of her book’s three sections, starting in the intimate spaces where we live with “Hearth,” expanding to what’s vying for life in “The Garden Gate,” and exploring endings that are often beginnings in “Beyond.” She also shines her considerable light on what it means to open our senses to the both coherent and broken web of life, writing about everything from zucchini to the Minnesota River Bottoms to Jeffers Petroglyphs. Her attention to the more-than-human world of plants especially helps us commune with other vibrant and resilient life all around us. Through original, vivid, and powerful language, Martin brings us home to, as she writes in one poem, “Chant the incantation of extravagant beauty.”

–Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, past Kansas poet Laureate, author of How Time Moves: New and Collected Poems

Julie’s love of the natural world comes to life with her careful witness of a moment – a catalpa tree, a spider, a walk along the Mississippi River, creating magic in miniature yet somehow opening the world.

–Ruth McArthur, author of Persistence