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To Begin Again
My fondest hope is that this book will serve as a kind of doorway. Not into my life, but into yours; where your meaning and magic are hidden… JH
To Begin Again is my debut collection of poems, and our second Blue Sky Press book. If In Her Own Right asked us to challenge the stories we’ve been told about who gets to be seen in the creative world, To Begin Again calls us to undo those stories inside ourselves, and reclaim our inner landscape as fertile ground for creating.
Some of the poems in this collection were born in our Blue Sky writing groups, and others were written during the pandemic while I was studying for my MFA. But it would be most accurate to say that this book arose out of my lifelong desire to name what mostly goes unnamed inside me; to speak the unspoken truths my body carries. Not in an attempt to fix or explain anything, but to turn towards and be with them. To receive their gifts.
Essentially this is my inner life, turned inside-out.
And I know, from countless conversations with our writing group participants and clients over the years, that we all live with unspoken griefs, wild hungers, strange flashes of joy. That inside every one of us is a vast, uncharted interior — an interior universe of feeling, memory, imagination, and presence that we’re taught to mistrust, but where our deepest knowing lives. And here’s the thing — the further I went into my own depths, the more I felt the presence of a shared, collective interior; a new opening into “we.” An essential pull towards together which I suspect is the key to creating the new world we want to live in.
My fondest hope is that this book will serve as a kind of doorway. Not into my life, but into yours; where your meaning and magic are hidden. I offer these poems, then, as little lamps to carry with you into your own uncharted territory…and maybe, beyond that, into a new wild world we create and inhabit together. Hope to see you there.
— Jillian Hanson
Praise for To Begin Again:
In To Begin Again the courageous and brilliant poet, Jillian Hanson, challenges us to follow, as she does, “…an itch/so deep in the bone you/can’t scratch it without taking yourself apart.” And through these exquisite poems, she follows the ineffable call of the mystery of being, itself.
— Patricia Lee Lewis, poet, novelist and founder of Patchwork Farm Writer’s Retreat
– 6 × 9
– Paperback
– Design by Alex Cohen
My fondest hope is that this book will serve as a kind of doorway. Not into my life, but into yours; where your meaning and magic are hidden… JH
To Begin Again is my debut collection of poems, and our second Blue Sky Press book. If In Her Own Right asked us to challenge the stories we’ve been told about who gets to be seen in the creative world, To Begin Again calls us to undo those stories inside ourselves, and reclaim our inner landscape as fertile ground for creating.
Some of the poems in this collection were born in our Blue Sky writing groups, and others were written during the pandemic while I was studying for my MFA. But it would be most accurate to say that this book arose out of my lifelong desire to name what mostly goes unnamed inside me; to speak the unspoken truths my body carries. Not in an attempt to fix or explain anything, but to turn towards and be with them. To receive their gifts.
Essentially this is my inner life, turned inside-out.
And I know, from countless conversations with our writing group participants and clients over the years, that we all live with unspoken griefs, wild hungers, strange flashes of joy. That inside every one of us is a vast, uncharted interior — an interior universe of feeling, memory, imagination, and presence that we’re taught to mistrust, but where our deepest knowing lives. And here’s the thing — the further I went into my own depths, the more I felt the presence of a shared, collective interior; a new opening into “we.” An essential pull towards together which I suspect is the key to creating the new world we want to live in.
My fondest hope is that this book will serve as a kind of doorway. Not into my life, but into yours; where your meaning and magic are hidden. I offer these poems, then, as little lamps to carry with you into your own uncharted territory…and maybe, beyond that, into a new wild world we create and inhabit together. Hope to see you there.
— Jillian Hanson
Praise for To Begin Again:
In To Begin Again the courageous and brilliant poet, Jillian Hanson, challenges us to follow, as she does, “…an itch/so deep in the bone you/can’t scratch it without taking yourself apart.” And through these exquisite poems, she follows the ineffable call of the mystery of being, itself.
— Patricia Lee Lewis, poet, novelist and founder of Patchwork Farm Writer’s Retreat
– 6 × 9
– Paperback
– Design by Alex Cohen