Spirit of Wild

Wild weaves through each of us, but the spirit of wild doesn't always rage. Sometimes it is the gentle, quiet moments alone in our souls that show us who and what we are. The spirit of strength, the spirit of wonder, the spirit of curiosity, the spirit of fury, the spirit of peace are all part of us. But we bottle or ignore them, questioning our anxiety and depression.

These poems speak to that spark in each of us that we might remember even through our sorrows, tragedies, joys, and silent seasons that the spirit of wild doesn't call us - it is us. Don't ignore it. Don't let it go. Hold it tight as you dream, when you wake, and as you live your day. Yes, live. Live and embrace wild.

"What did you want to be, when you thought you could / be anything?" asks poet KB Ballentine. The poems in this luminous collection emerge as beacons, offering guidance in brief moments bound in rich imagery. Ballentine's unmistakable voice and skill with language shine throughout, balancing the natural world with the natural interiors of the human heart. What is the "spirit of wild" if not that pairing, that step into our truest selves as "the restless wind whispers courage." Find your courage in these poems.

-Sandy Coomer, author of The Broken Places

As KB Ballentine delves without fear from windowed rooms into a wilderness of forest and ocean, it soon becomes clear that even the darkness in her collection Spirit of Wild is one that teems with life, wing, and song. Ballentine shows us that there is "a shelter for the sacred in each of us." Spirit of Wild is a balm, and I didn't know how much I needed it.

-Chera Hammons, author of Maps of Injury

Spirit of Wild confirms that "each day waits with sudden mysteries, / offerings, / like dreams half-remembered / from the night." In lyrical, precise language that throbs and pulses with the rhythms of the natural world, Ballentine celebrates the spirit of all manner of life's organic wonders, from the fox and wren to the bee and seahorse, to lavender fog and "stones cloaked in mossy silence." I can't think of a better time for this exuberant collection to come to light, nor a better time to heed Ballentine's call to "cast off the rooms where we've boxed ourselves tight / step into the den of the forest's deep heart."

-- Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions