Hari Om, Hurry Home by Brenda Nicholas

With a keen eye for detail and a large heart, Nicholas writes of how her yoga practice yokes spirit to flesh, attends to the losses still resonant within her body. Indeed, all through this volume, the material and spiritual worlds meet. And in those charged meetings, we are given deftly drawn glimpses of her experience as a woman of deep feeling, of her uncommon humanity.

–Mark Cox, author of Readiness and Sorrow Bread

In Hari Om, Hurry Home, Brenda Nicholas’ lucid and stellar collection of poems, her yoga practice is her poetry and her poetry, her yoga practice. There is no separation—only this ingenious, exquisite connection.

–Malena Mörling, author of Ocean Avenue and Astoria

This lovely and heartfelt collection takes us from “First Yoga Class,” where “warm energy/ emerges from a newly lit lamp/ in some dark corner of an organ deep within,” to “Balasana, Child’s Pose,” where the speaker thinks “of babies sleeping/ as if steeping . . . like tiny tea bags nestled/ against the side of this world.” With such fresh imagery, the poems move smoothly from asana (pose) to asana, reminding us that “Yoga means to yoke, to connect,” as the speaker moves through divorce, childrearing, lovers, and her father’s death, deepening her practice as she goes. By the end of class, we are enlightened by “Savansana, Corpse Pose,” where the speaker imagines her dying father “carefully packing my final words/ to move into his new home inside my heart.” Beautiful and true.

–Barbara Ungar, author of Save Our Ship and Immortal Medusa