DESCRIPTION

Poetry. “What begins in grief, sails forth like a ship’s spider on silk rigging, swinging from a draft of hope. PASSING THROUGH BLUE EARTH is a lyric meditation on the vagary and seduction of life, a celebration of both ‘presence and absence on this blue planet / this perfect earth.’ One is haunted by its loveliness.” —Sandra Alcosser

“Cynthia Neely’s love of this blue planet sings out in poetry that weaves beauty and loss, love and grief, the conflicting pulls of holding on and letting go. Rich in music and precise observation, these poems grapple with the paradoxes of life, mixing ode and elegy into the final, poignant truth that we are all only passing through.” —Ellen Bass

“PASSING THROUGH BLUE EARTH is an elegant meditation on grief, and in the hands of a poet of careful precision and unsentimental emotion, we are granted to discover beauty in the uncertainties of life—its unpredictability that ranges from the molecular, the cellular, to the grander issues of the environment and our place in it. Cynthia Neely is a poet of great skill and intelligence who welcomes us into her private way of seeing and feeling the world. We are the better for having accepted her invitation.” —Kwame Dawes

AUTHOR BIO

Cynthia Neely is a poet and a painter. She lives with her husband and son up an unmaintained mountain road in the Cascade foothills of North Central Washington and spends her summers on an off-grid island in Georgian Bay, Canada. These places have been indelibly etched into her persona and so into her poetry and paintings. The natural world and her place in it have always been important to her and to her work. When she travels from these areas she invariably heads north. Neely is the 2011 winner of the Hazel Lipa Poetry Chapbook Prize for Broken Water published by Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. Her critical work has appeared in The Writers’ Chronicle, and her poems in numerous print and online journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, and Terrain.org, and in several anthologies. Her full-length book of poetry, Flight Path, was published in 2014 as a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University.

Author City: LEAVENWORTH, WA USA