My newest chapbook, The Smallest Working Pieces, is out now included in By Way Of, the fifth installment of The Quartet Series. Chapbooks by Emily Carr, Diana Woodcock and Diana Alvarez fill out the perfect bound collection, so for one price you get four books. Of the collection, Susan Settlemeyer Wilson has said, “by a remarkable alchemy, these disparate elements merge into a single, compelling unity.”
Compelling. That’s a good word. I’m hoping many of you feel compelled to buy this book to experience that alchemical reaction. Poet Cynthia Hogue says, “Nienow’s poems are lyrically spare and mysterious, often striking a perfect balance between concrete and abstract, as in the brilliant “String Theory”: “Burnished. Bead. Spotted/ and shining. . . . What could be is only/ a limit of the mind.” If you read my first chapbook I think that this work will feel new and surprising.
We have a book launch reading coming up October 4th at the Katonah Museum in New York. I’m looking forward to meeting the other authors and getting my hands on a copy of this beautiful book. Order your copy here.
I’ve also begun making high quality audio recordings of all the poems so that I might offer those alongside the book to any interested parties…let me know if I’m talking about you.
And if you’re still not convinced, here’s the first poem in the book…the tease or trailer if you will:
In the Tall Grass
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In the field of a stranger’s mouth
In the tangled oak savanna
Under the one tree casting a shadow
Where a name entered the trunk at the end of a blade
Where bark grew around barbed wire
With no fence in sight
Where the grass could hide a child
Where the closest neighbor is the sky
Say prairie fire and mean it
Say flames devoured timothy and blue stem
Put me in your shoes and tie them tight
Light the fire yourself
I’m interested to know what happens
When earth is burning and we can’t see beyond the smoke
