Owlfeather Collective is pleased to announce the publication of Suzanne Ironbiter’s new poetry collection, The Ideal in the Mind.

“In my rushing mind / where does clarity open its luminous space among the cloudy worlds of thought?”

In her latest collection of poetry, Suzanne Ironbiter generously offers the reader insights into sources of clarity and steadiness in this troubled world. She situates herself among fellow creatures, attentive to a marvelous multitude of plants from dandelions to old oaks and animals from bees to whales. From this foundation, Ironbiter’s poems confidently reach out to take strength from everyday objects and activities, as well as lessons from indigenous, Buddhist, and scientific thoughtways, and joy from well-loved storytellers and artists. Her poems seek and find balm for herself and those around her as we all struggle through these times of COVID.

Anyone interested in contemplative poetry, spiritual reflection, and study of the mind – the heart/mind as Buddhists know it – will find much nourishment in this volume.

Available on Amazon

Proceeds from the sale of this book support Riverkeeper and the Community Center of Northern Westchester.

Owlfeather Collective is pleased to announce the publication of Rooting, a bilingual edition of Marianela Medrano’s selected poems.

The poems enter into the sensual and spiritual layers of Medrano’s life in a woman’s body. She explores painful scars and sacred memories, her rooting in and uprooting from her Dominican motherland and Taino heritage.

Inside the sternum
underneath the wing, I penetrate myself,
the same ripped and tattered soul I left behind….

The collection moves from longer, historically and culturally interwoven poems, to a delicate sequence of “Key” poems.

Shadow and light,
the word settles into the bodies.
At the intersection
it opens a sacred space.

In Rooting/Des/arraigar, Dominican poet Marianela Medrano offers an array of poems that traverse diasporic paths of memory, pain, desire, and love….Be it the recounting of a fledgling poet’s discovery of her own voice or the full-throated celebration of the Divine Feminine found in the mythic landscapes of Taino goddesses and gods, the poems of Rooting/Des/arraigar firmly anchor their author among the best of her generation.

Christopher A. McGrath, Grand Valley State University

Marianela Medrano is a Dominican writer and poet with a PhD in psychology, living in Stamford, Connecticut. Her individual publications include: Oficio de Vivir (Buho, 1986), Los Alegres Ojos de la Tristeza (Buho, 1987), Regando Esencias/The Scent of Waiting (Alcance, 1998), Curada de Espantos (Torremozas, 2002), Diosas de la Yuca (Torremozas, 2011), Prietica (Alfaguara, 2013).

Proceeds from the sale of this book support GraceWorks, Inc.

To buy Rooting, you can send a check made out to GraceWorks, Inc. for $18 (includes shipping and handling) to GraceWorks, 6 Rushmore Circle, Stamford, CT 06905. You may also order it online at www.graceworksinternational.org. Go to “Support” and donate $18. The transaction will automatically issue you a receipt for your tax files as well as provide GraceWorks the address to mail you the book.

Owlfeather Collective is pleased to announce the publication of Ralph Nazareth’s new poetry collection, Between Us the Long Road.

In conversation with himself and others he meets along the way, Nazareth confronts the bewildering dislocations and locations of suffering in our times. Particularly poignant are the poems from his visits to the Middle East, where he gives voice to complex emotional, spiritual and cultural issues in himself and the people he meets there. In one of these poems, “The Storyteller,” he hears:

If you begin to taste the bitterness
they carried in their hearts, you’ll have embarked
on the prayer we call listening,
stranger, India’s son, closer to me than brother.

In Between Us the Long Road , we as readers and listeners embark with him “on the prayer we call listening.”

The wonder & beauty of Ralph Nazareth’s book is a fierce balancing between the personal & historical, between borders, between blood & blood. These poems intertwine the author’s life with ‘the wild swings of history’ & so Between Us the Long Road demands our travel. Humanity should not forget the horrors but, somehow, usually does, & ‘In the middle of all this, who can remember / The universe is ours to make, unmake, re-make?’ Ralph Nazareth knows that to make it we must face brutality, embrace denials, celebrate desires, & realize we contribute to the slaughter. Yet what this book so powerfully communicates is that when we pay attention, the journey’s end is love.”

Duane Esposito, poet, Declaration for Your Bones

Ralph Nazareth is a poet and teacher. His book Ferrying Secrets was published in Hyderabad, India in 2005 and Cristal: Poems Selectos in Ecuador in 2015. He has taught for over four decades in schools, colleges, universities and maximum security prisons in the U.S. The managing Editor of Yuganta Press, he currently also heads GraceWorks, Inc. an international, nonprofit, charitable foundation. He lives with his wife Marianela Medrano in Stamford, CT.

Proceeds from the sale of this book support GraceWorks, Inc..

To buy Between Us the Long Road, you can send a check made out to GraceWorks, Inc. for $15 (includes shipping and handling) to GraceWorks, 6 Rushmore Circle, Stamford, CT 06905. You may also order it online at www.graceworksinternational.org. Go to “Support” and donate $15. The transaction will automatically issue you a receipt for your tax files as well as provide GraceWorks the address to mail you the book.