How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems
By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Meadowlark Press, 2020, cover art by Tony Peterson
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Available at Meadowlark Press and the Raven Bookstore.
How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems brings together over 30 years of Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s poetry on what it means to be human in a particular place, time, body, history, and story. “She is our teacher speaking from the sky, from the field, from the heartland,” writes Oregon Poet Laureate Kim Stafford. “Like William Blake’s ‘doors of perception,’ these pages lead readers inward and outward at once,” Denise Low, past poet laureate of Kansas, says of the new poems.
The collection also includes poetry from Mirriam-Goldberg’s previous six collections: Following the Curve, Chasing Weather, Landed, Animals in the House, Reading the Body, and Lot’s Wife.
“Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s How Time Moves enacts the largesse and endurance of the upright piano on its cover, in poems that span a life with ‘the urgency of living in a world on the cusp of vanishing.’ True to its title, time is a paramount issue in these poems—not simply its passing, but its potential, in complicity with imagination, to invent and resurrect the future. ‘From years ahead, I wait for her to turn into the future,’ she writes of her great-grandmother in a Lithuanian village whose inhabitants ‘will face the gun or the gas chamber,’…and ‘the breath/from her body that will one day be my body.’ The bridge between past and future is ‘a freeway of stars,’ and wind, and breath, and always, for Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, poetry.” ~ Diane Seuss, Pulitzer-prize winning author of frank: sonnets.
“Those familiar with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s verse know the humor, the inventiveness, and the revelations. Her How Time Moves: New and Selected Poems samples generously from all of her books, a span of 25 years. The new poems show a master poet at work, as in ‘Thresholds,’ where story and song blend to create a further dimension, where ‘all the gears of blossom / keep turning, all the doors continually open wide.’ Like William Blake’s “doors of perception,” these pages lead readers inward and outward at once. Congratulations to her for this stupendous book! ~ Denise Low, 2007-09 Kansas Poet Laureate, Shadow Light: Poems, Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award
“This poet testifies her tug of kinship to feral storms, kitchen appliances, crows, the pluck of old ladies, helpless love, and other denizens of the wide world brought living to her pages. Drawn from twenty five years of lyric devotion, Caryn brings this harvest to Meadowlark Books in a collection with gifts for everyone: blessing, consolation, self-portrait, field guide, yoga gesture, biblical telling, song, memory, spell. She is our teacher speaking from the sky, from the field, from the heartland.” ~ Kim Stafford, Oregon Poet Laureate & author of Wild Honey, Tough Salt
Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is a generous and insightful poet, brave in her candor and ever awake to the world around her, ready for all the truth it can offer her each day. In Mirriam-Goldberg’s poetry, even cancer becomes epiphany, an occasion of ecstatic awakening. This is the real work of a poet — to see and speak the often-hidden truths of a human life in a way that enlightens and informs. In the cumulative power of her new and selected poems, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg accomplishes this with grace, insight, courage, and unceasing wonder. ~ Patricia Traxler, author of Naming the Fires
“In How Time Moves, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg offers us a magical gift: a compilation of new and selected poems, rich with memory and meaning. ‘Expect to be startled,’ the poet tells us. And we are." ~ Joy Roulier Sawyer
Following the Curve
By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Spartan Press, 2017, cover art by Rodney Troth
Available at The Raven Bookstore
“All spiritual journeys have a destination of which the traveler is unaware,” Martin Buber writes, and in this collection of embodied poetry, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg journeys into the cusp of art and soul to explore what it is to be a body across life changes and ages. The poems here speak to poetry in motion as well as breathing into the deeper experience of yoga and embodiment. Whether you practice yoga or not, these poems can expand your perspective of living in and being a body in motion and stillness, youth and age, alone and with others.
Listen to Caryn reading from Following the Curve on New Letters on the Air here
Chasing Weather: Tornadoes, Tempests, and Thunderous
Skies in Word & Image
By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg and Stephen Locke
Ice Cube Press, 2014
Cover art and all photography by Stephen Locke
Winner, Kansas Notable Book &
Midwest Booksellers Assn. Best Pick
Available in Lawrence, Kansas at the Raven Bookstore,
Ice Cube Books, and Amazon
Our Story: We love weather. As a girl, it was love at first storm for Caryn, who grew up in the east. When she landed in Kansas, she was hooked for life. Stephen, who grew up in Boulder, Colorado, was captivated by the afternoon thunderstorms from the mountains, especially the cloud-to-ground lightning. We met on Facebook when Stephen asked Caryn the very question she was about to ask him: do we want to create a book together of poetry and photography? For the last four years, we’ve been creating a whole body of new work in word and image of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail storms, panoramic lightning, sunset and midnight storms, and spectacular supercells. Weather subtly shapes our days, infuses our moods and interactions, and at times, completely re-orients our lives. Catching moments of stunning beauty and surprising shifts in the sky helps make the vibrant and variable world more visible to us, and shows us how to truly see where and who we are.
“This ravishing call and response between a fearlessly roving artist-with-a-camera (Locke) and a lyric laureate of the heart’s workings under Kansas heavens (Mirriam-Goldberg) is both glorious and intimate. Wonderfully illustrating the dynamism and vastness of prairie skies and prairie soul, Chasing Weather is a volume to treasure in these stormy times.” ~ Stephanie Mills, author, Tough Little Beauties and Epicurean Simplicity
“The photographs are tempest wars, but a war of flowers and silence and color and God’s calling his/her poems out over the land. And the poems are silver threads that weave through the darkening sky and gates and light unspooling from the heart’s loom a dream of joy and ancestral echoes.” ~ Jimmy Santiago Baca, author, A Glass Of Water and Singing At The Gates and founder, Cedar Tree, Inc.
“What a beautiful book, a gorgeous pairing of photos and poetry! These images are at once alluring and startling, awe-inspiring and terrifying—the joining of heaven and earth. Chasing Weather unlocks the power of nature on the Great Plains—the ever changing, fascinating drama of the sky.” ~ Mary Swander, Poet Laureate of Iowa, author, Farmscape: The Changing Rural Environment.
“Being a native Kansan, I thought I had a clear image of what stormy, tornado-ridden skies looked and felt like, but after seeing Stephen Locke’s astonishing, almost surreal photographs, I realize how much I had missed. Coupled with Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s lyrical, other-worldly poetry, the photographs come to life and suddenly I can see my beloved Heartland in a whole new way.”~ Kelley Hunt, singer/songwriter, The Beautiful Bones
Landed
By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Mammoth Publications, 2009, cover art by Terry Evans
Available at the Raven Bookstore or at Amazon.
"The poems in Landed are as close to prayer as language can get, if prayer is vision that sees into the souls of things and music that makes us move to old healing rhythms. I find myself writing whole stanzas in my journal and quoting phrases to friends wondering, 'Now who said that?' Caryn Miriam Goldberg gives voice to what can’t be put into words, she sets us free of old paradigms, she writes like a dream." ~ Julia Alvarez, author of The Woman I Kept To Myself and Return to Sender
"Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s fourth book of poems, Landed, holds abundant brightnesses that delight the mind and enter the heart. The collection is rich with details both sacred and commonplace—the fine-honed work of a poet at her peak. Mirriam-Goldberg is a master of the paradoxical as she gifts the reader with insights that are at once disconcerting and comforting; as she holds joy and grief in the same hand, and asks us to trust the maker of these poems—her courage, her wisdom, and her truthtelling, as if she’s lived infinity." ~Maureen Seaton, author of Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen and Sex Talks to Girls
"Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s newest book of poetry invites readers to enter her grand tent of imagined reality. It resembles our shared world of flora, fauna, family, and towns. Yet readers must pole vaults into mythic dimensions, across historic rivers, and into altered spectrums. Mirriam-Goldberg has tight control of language, which she bends into wonderful shapes. This is a mature poet at her best." ~Denise Low, Kansas Poet Laureate 2007-09
"Caryn’s poetry goes straight to the marrow, turning us inward so we can see in the rare clarity of darkness. With her richly textured, deceptively simple language, she seduces us into introspection through the beauty of both natural and inner landscapes. This is more than a book of poetry; it is a space in which mind, body and spirit merge, bringing the reader face-to-face with wholeness." ~ Marianela Medrano, writer and psychotherapist
"Here are poems of rapture and reverence for the natural world, love poems for partners, friends and children and multiple meditations on the body. Her series of Self-Portraits echoes Pablo Neruda’s Odes and interrogates the mysteries of self and time passing. Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is writing at the peak of her powers – she captures the small and large epiphanies that make us see the world differently, in all its wonder, pain, complexity and beauty." ~ Victoria Field, author of Many Waters, writer and poetry therapist in Cornwall, UK
Animals in the House
By Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg
Woodley Press, 2004, cover art by Paul Hotvedt
Available through the Raven Bookstore, and through Amazon
“‘Nothing prepares you for the real,’ writes Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg in this soaring flock of tones and images that is this wonderful book of poems. Nothing prepares us, and so we stumble and fall and break into blossom, bite persimmons, and birth ourselves again and again. How any of us weather the darkening climate of these times is a wonder; it is such books as this that help us breathe.” ~ David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous.
“Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg’s voice is imbued with love, humor and wisdom. She wields plain words powerfully. Her comprehension of nature borders on the absolute. Her wonderful poems state the seamlessness of the cosmic and mundane, the molten paradoxes of intimacy and otherness, identity and separation.” ~ Stephanie Mills, author of Epicurian Simplicity and In Search of the Wild.
“These noble, ecstatic poems reflect a woman on the edge of life and death. She runs like any animal into the dark ‘that isn’t so dark’ and with new eyes sees there what sustains her — a different light, a hidden room, hope and healing. Her words capture the richness of Kansas landscape and the internal wildness of animals that feed our very existence, give us courage to breathe in every minute and move on.” ~ Perie Longo, author, The Privacy of Wind.
“Animals in the House is a collection of poems that celebrates the power of the natural world to shape us into what we’re meant to be. These poems lift us out of the container we call our selves, shape us toward trusting what we can never completely know, place us more firmly on the trustworthy ground of earth that has the power to heal and renew.” — Renee Gregorio, author, The Storm That Tames Us.
Out of Print But Most of These Poems Are In How Time Moves: New & Selected Poems
Reading the Body
Mammoth Publication, 2004
Cover art by Kathy Hird Wright
This chapbook is a collection of poetry about breast cancer and finding ways to reinhabit the body. Come on a journey from diagnosis through chemotherapy and surgeries to healing. These poems speak to what it is to be a body facing issues of mortality as well as exploring what it means to be a woman, mother, and being throughout extensive treatment and deep healing. Written to accompany a collaborative performance between the Prairie Wind Dancers, Kelley Hunt, and Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, this book has gone on to become a favorite of many facing breast cancer and the people who love them.
Lot's Wife
Woodley Memorial Press, 2000, cover art by Celia Smith
Caryn’s first collection of poetry explores the power of myth, especially from voices outside the usual margins of the story. Drawing from the bible, Greek and Roman mythology, folktales, fairy tales, and contemporary culture, Caryn sings to the roots of the guiding stories that show us how to live and be. She particularly focuses on voices of women who dared to look back in order to look forward
"Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg is a wise, witty and wry poet." ~ Alicia Ostriker, author of Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America
"There were never two women, just Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, split into myths, riper than pomegranates and out of all time. I love these poems." ~ Stanley Lombardo, translator of The Illiad
"Lot’s Wife tells stories about heroines, especially the women of the Bible, fairy tales, and myth. Each poem suggests a possible solution to the mystery of gender and human identity. Mirriam-Goldberg has published widely already, and this, her first book, is a well crafted, important debut." ~ Denise Low, Poet Laureate of Kansas 2007-2009
