Lonnie Howard evokes such beauty and naturalness, describing what is close to her heart, and to my heart in kinship: peaches, a small adobe on Acequia Madre, a mother bear, and particularly, the fox. These poems are rich with observations of nature, full of love and kindness, rare in these cynical times.

She bows to wildness, the untame, but also to creatures and persons forgotten or neglected. She seesthe communication between a man and a sunflower.

She feels connection to two men sitting on a bus stop bench, and she gives the readers that connection. I am so glad Lonnie has shared her observations of the world in these beautiful poems, and I join her in acknowledging the mystery that is our lives.

—Catherine Ferguson, author of I Thought You Would Be ShelterEmerging from a timeless line of poet-wanderers and making it her practice to consider everything the Beloved, Lonnie Howard gives herself up to landscape, its creatures, and people. She is storyteller, observer, the thing itself, and what remains unspoken.

Whether sitting still in the forest until warblers alight on you, giving snow from her yard back to the sea, or being black bear entering the dreams of humans, she immerses us in vast cycles and intimate glimpses of interbeing with other species, delivering us, wonder-struck, into the mysteries of being. .

. and then we dissolve with her into a pillow exploding into ten thousand freed feathers.

These are finely wrought poems of experiencing the wonders of existence and consciousness. —Jane Lipman, author of On the Back Porch of the Moon, Winner of the 2013 NM-AZ Book Award and a NM Press Women’s AwardIn her first book, Santa Fe, New Mexico poet, Lonnie Howard opens the space between sound where we can let our tears and praises out without being embarrassed.

In “Writers in exile” she tells us. .

. there was something / in the sound, something in the space / between sound / the place between inhalation / and exhalation / the place where we are one.

As you turn these pages, you will hear and share what brings love into the space in your own heart. —James McGrath, author of Collected Poems of James McGrath.