Solidarity Spotlight: poetry that heals us
a look at my friend Krissy Kludt's new book!
Friends,
I am celebrating poetry today, how it speaks to us, heals us, helps us move through difficult times, and I want to share just a few with you—and shout out a beautiful upcoming poetry book!
First, one I read just this morning that paused my heart and brought tears to my eyes, “The World I Live In” by Mary Oliver:
I have refused to live locked in the orderly house of reasons and proofs. The world I live in and believe in is wider than that. And anyway, what’s wrong with Maybe? You wouldn’t believe what once or twice I have seen. I’ll just tell you this: only if there are angels in your head will you ever, possibly, see one.
And celebrating the power of resistance poetry throughout history from this Colbert clip (go to 20:00 if you don’t want to watch the whole thing)
Finally, announcing this gorgeous poetry book that I want you to order RIGHT AWAY!
I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little by Krissy Kludt is out MARCH 5th!
Krissy Kludt is not just a dear friend, but one of the most tender, committed, community-oriented writers I know. Her poetry comes from a deep well, and she stays in daily relationship with the landscapes around her, which you’ll feel in this book.
I want to share my endorsement for the book with you:
If I could somehow read this book with my eyes closed, hand over my heart, I would. Kludt’s words bring you to complete stillness, poetry wrapped up as a gift in images and embodiments that carry us far from wherever we are and deeper into ourselves at the same time. Read this book, and let her words walk you home to your own sacred belonging.
Available now for preorder from Bookshop.org.
About the book:
Set among the oak-dotted hills and granite heights of northern California, I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little distills moments of communion with the natural world into spare, lilting language. The poems traverse ordinary days and periods of loss; they are elegy and wish. They examine motherhood and daughterhood and turn to the living land as source of solace and nurturing. Each poem reaches for reverent wakefulness, “to attend / to know how shadows move as sun shifts / to notice every fiddlehead who rises, startling.”
About Krissy Kludt:
Poet Krissy Kludt is the founder and executive director of Writing the Wild. Her debut poetry collection, I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little, is forthcoming from Green Writers Press on March 5, 2026. Her work appears in anthologies The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press 2025), Taking Liberties (Cutthroat 2025), and Stories from the Trail(Wayfarer Books 2024), and in other publications, including Terrain.org, The Wildness We Tend, and Humana Obscura. She lives in the Driftless region of southwestern Wisconsin.
And here is the best part—an early look at one of her poems!
AGAINST THE PRODUCTIVE DRIVE It’s Tuesday, and the boys are off to school. She walks home: chalk skies, elm leaves’ skitter-swirl, last night’s spider-sheen at the gate, Darjeeling, and the foot-scuff on the gray porch chair with stuffing clouding out where she curls her legs. Beryl light butters the maple leaves; towhee scritches in the duff. Blessed be the nothing. __
An excerpt from I Could Walk Forever and Know So Little, coming March 5, 2026 from Green Writers Press. (Used by permission. All rights reserved.)
Onward, friends, to support one another in every good thing.
Over the last decade I’ve used so many tools and tricks to figure out my daily life as a writer, and I’d love to share some of them with you! We will workshop ideas for how to build our day and explore different ways to understand the writing life through an Indigenous lens.
This is an evening event! I am hoping that makes it more accessible for folks who work during the day.
Please come join us on February 20th!
Reminder for paid subscribers, we have three writing sessions this month!
This morning I started using a new planner. Next to the schedule column is a large blank space titled "Today". I wasn't sure how I would fill it. I now know it will be with these poems.
Thank you for this healing medicine.
So much hope in your Solidarity Spotlight post today! Digesting, fermenting thoughts. Sharing a small true story. Davon, age 6 is playing outside grandma's house stacking and restacking the wood pile. Grandma exists the patio door and cautions Davon that this could be a dangerous things to be doing...he might get hurt. Davon looks up and responds: "Granna, in every project there's a maybe!" The wisdom of an 'old soul'....Mary Oliver's wisdom too.