For those ready to begin putting the pieces of yourself together again, this one is for you. This collection is a message to anyone who has ever felt broken: you will feel whole again. Between these pages, you will find compassion, understanding, and many reminders of all the beauty that you deserve. You will look back one day and wonder why you ever doubted your ability to heal, rebuild, and feel whole again.
Interior illustrations by Malinda Labriola; Edited by Terah Cox with Malinda Labriola. The Ongoing is Joni Grâce's third work, a collection of poems compiled from her writings over several seasons on the shores of Georgian Bay in Ontario, Canada, her travels throughout North America, and additional poems that emerged in 2020-22. Her affinity for nature and for curating the “greening” of both soil and soul permeates her writings and captures the mysteries of ebb and flow that interweave human nature and the natural world.
Each poem, standing alone or within the continuum of the collections, is a living, breathing microcosm of the ongoing circle-journey from self to other, and the evolution to new selfness, that makes our personal and collective worlds go meaningfully ‘round. The intensity of emotion in her first release, Feeling in the Gap, plumbs her own interiority while sounding herself in both the literal and metaphorical presence of her surroundings. Her second book, Carried Away, a poetic odyssey through the wilds of the inner terrain and the natural world, immerses us in the mists of the inner-outer quest, while seeking the greater gift in relationship with other. The Ongoingexpands relationship to encircle and meld with the flora and fauna that she not only observes, but tends throughout—representing a maturation, a wisdoming, of both poet and poetry. Here the deep interiority of Feeling in the Gap and Carried Away seems to have birthed The Ongoing as a tribute to, and proof of, the ever-reclaimable triumph of self rediscovered, even reconstituted, in alchemical relationship with the natural world.
In this collection of memoir poems, James C. Morehead (Poet Laureate of Dublin, California) brings universal themes to life through journeys to the USSR and the mountains of Tuscany, the concert halls in San Francisco and a tiny town in Wyoming, the cables of Yosemite’s Half Dome and the beaches of Normandy.