Description
Peace Maps
by Karen K. Lewis
$14.99, paper
978-1-64662-252-8
2020
Charting themes of globalization, cultural endurance, motherhood, solitude, inherited trauma, deep ecology, love, loss, and hope, the poems in Peace Maps invite readers on trails of actuality and possibility.
Karen K. Lewis lives in rural Northern California between the forest and the sea. She holds an MFA from Antioch Los Angeles and has traveled widely. Karen leads workshops with California Poets in the Schools and is a former Director of the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. Her poems explore territory of physical and imaginary geographies, to map historical and personal moments of solitude, motherhood, loss, endurance, desire, surrender.
Karen Lewis –
Here’s a poem (a ghazal) from the collection.
Summer Solstice Stargazing
[39.303, -123.795]
Night summons us to an abyss of rhymed imagination
where instinct knots blue helixes to find imagination.
I dream about the taste of summer’s moon and salty stars
curled within courage of my daughter’s kind imagination.
What song do migrating whales whisper? Ancient trees
scatter sparks across damp sand, while oracles rewind imagination.
Galactic prayers summon children born of love, not
violence— along unexplored latitudes of blind imagination.
Indigo nights delight the poet and her daughter,
who listen for bronze chimes of infinite imagination.
Karen (verified owner) –
Chaco Canyon
[36.063, -107.964]
The question of mesquite,
near water, not far from fire
and howling coyotes—a thirst
twisting deeper than roots between
boulders.
The question of rock,
where gray and blue sky
whirl across circles of stones
shaped twice: by earth, by hands—
a settlement abandoned.
A question of the lost egg
from that rust-stained bird
whose shadow stalks us—
wings, feathers, empty sky,
thorns.
A question of snow
sudden, falling in silence
to cover our
footprints.
Mary Oak –
Read Peace Maps slowly, in order to savor each poem and allow its tastes to linger, its echoes to resound. I see these poems as a response to the question Karen invites in her first poem, “Where does your heart touch lightning?” Through honed and radiant words, she illuminates places that have struck her heart and strikes the reader’s heart as well. Her range of poetic forms kept me surprised and I was astonished by her vivid lexicon of colors. This is a book I will keep close at hand to dip into for inspiration.