Cloister Walk by Priscilla Melchior

The poems of Melchior Cloister Walk are an invitation to be steadfast and reverent as we scour the seasonal appearance of bird and beast to understand the dictates of nature. Melchior asks readers to still themselves at the precipice of nature’s brutality and witness the hunger that drives us all. Exact as a stone shaped by the forces of water, wind, and time, these poems invite our attention, our dedication.

–Amber Flora Thomas, Author of Eye of Water: Poems

In Cloister Walk, Priscilla Melchior’s devout poems act as prayers that aspire to “summon wildness deep within,” to join with coyotes and howl into the night our “discordant hymns.” The sacred text these poems draw from is the natural world, a space Melchior portrays as brimming with life and death, more miraculous than any human holy text, a space where even a “twirling leaf / dangling by a single spider thread” means the world.

–John Hoppenthaler, Author of Night Wing over Metropolitan Area

These poems sing of the “the miracle of the everyday” such as “the mystery/of deer as they evaporate into the woods.” They are poems of observation and spirituality, ones that urge us to pay attention to the natural world. They insist there is a “fierce joy” in watching the turkey vulture and hummingbird, in listening to the wind and coyote. Read these poems, and you will want to go for a slow walk.

–Joe Mills, Author of Bodies in Motion