Weight of Water by Samantha Wallen

Our current era is one of terrible damage to living beings, to the entire biosphere. One naturalist, now gone, told people at Naropa University that it is the “era of the great dying.” Instead of studiously looking away, Samantha Wallen takes her poems to the heart of the dying. There, right in the midst of so many tough emotions, life in its fleeting beauty appears. The whole realm of biology is singing. Place this set of poems on the shelf where you keep your survival manuals.

–Andrew Schelling, Author of Forests, Temples, Glacial Rivers and Songs of Mirabai

Samantha Wallen‘s poetry reads like a soft prayer, or a delicate spell, casting forward and backward a web of intimate encounters and silent reckonings. In this short collection of superbly crafted poems, we are in the hands of a graceful guide, who is intent on opening our eyes and hearts so that we may get a glimpse of our own majesty and mortality equally, and sometimes in the same breath. I cannot say enough about Wallen’s work, it must be read more than twice in order to savor the complexity of all that has gone into it.

–Tim Z. Hernandez,  Author of They Call You Back, and Some of the Light 

How shall we live now? How do we dare to face what the animal in us already knows? Samantha Wallen addresses these questions with a lover’s devotion and a seer’s clarity. With authority earned through intimacy, Samantha’s verses create possibilities: we can still love this burning earth and her inhabitants with vigor, we can bear witness to the sacred and contaminated splendor.

–nan seymour, Author of prayers not meant for heaven