The Hills Around Are Dust and Light - Karen Gookin

These poems sketch a portrait of the author's growing-up years in Montana surrounded by her wheat-farming father, a busy at-home mother, two older siblings, and a lonely grandmother. Moments of strife and stress return, but here you will also find joy and a great deal of love and gratitude for each other, for hard work, for the mystery of life, for the land, and for what the land has endured. Her poems become the embodiment of memories-from eating brown sugar sandwiches, to skipping rocks on a Glacier Park lake, to wandering through dreams and the afterlife-as they offer family stories, tragedies, speculation, and attempts to understand it all.

"The dust and light filter through as loss and grace in these poems...There is no dogma here, rather a steady gaze on mystery, a soul alert to it, and poems that come to us as gifts and guides." -Catherine Abbey Hodges, author of In a Rind of Light

"...delight and satisfaction, all in a voice that is clear, precise, deeply felt, spiritual-an antidote to the confusions of our time." -Joseph Powell, author of The Slow Subtraction ALS

"Images rustle as softly and poignantly as the Montana wheat fields with which she grew up... her words shimmer and take us with her, gladly." -Susan Blair, author of What Remains of a Life