Middle Creek
Publishing & Audio

In The Next Noise Is Our Hearts, Kathleen Willard balances her deep love of nature with the alarming news of global warming, but she believes whatever obstacles are presented in terms of saving our planet, we have the ability to overcome them. Willard maintains that if we landed on the moon in the era of slide rulers and almost primitive computers, we have the capacity to solve the environmental problems that confront us and the poems in her book are a call to action. She includes some of the poems in her award-winning chapbook Cirque & Sky, winner of the Fledge Poetry Chapbook Award, which focused on the Rocky Mountain West, highlighting both its beauty and environmental demise. The Next Noise Is Our Hearts reaches beyond the borders of Colorado and sets her sights on the entire planet. Her book evokes an unabashed celebration of the natural world as she shares her love of bees, the northern white rhinoceros, bison, coral reefs, and whales balanced by her poetic and science-based investigations into many environmental issues including extinction, fracking, wildfires and drought. She reminds us that the planet Earth is paradise, and worth every effort to preserve it. We are in an era of adaptation, as there is no going back or time for nostalgia. The Earth is heating up and we are in the middle of determining what a climate scientist calls “livable equilibrium.” How will we move forward? Her poems are personal because they share both her deep awe at the wonders and beauty of nature, and her deep sorrow that we lack the collective resolve to heed Henry David Thoreau’s belief, “In wildness is preservation of the world.”

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Praise for Kathleen Willards Previous chapbook, Cirque & Sky

 

"Cirque & Sky evokes a 'periodic table of agitation' over the continued environmental plunder of Colorado and, by extension, the world. This powerful and beautiful book asks, 'How long before we are all fluent in earth?' "

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—John Calderazzo, English Professor Emeritus, Colorado State University, author of The Exact Weight of the Soul (poetry), and Rising Fire: Volcanoes & Our Inner Lives (non-fiction)

 

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"Kathleen Willard’s Cirque & Sky attunes its lyric eye to local ecological crises, from the ravages of pine beetles to the orange bloom of Benzene in rivers, and children sledding down radioactive mine tailings in Uravan, Colorado."

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—Dan Beachy-Quick, Professor of Poetry, Colorado State University, author of 20 books of poetry and literary essays

 

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"Cirque & Sky seeks, as Emerson would have it, that genius which repairs the decay of things. For hers is a vision that includes love, of other and of land, with song offering its necessary resistance to ruin."

—Dan Beachy-Quick, Professor of Poetry, Colorado State University, author of 20 books of poetry and literary essays

 

 

“These pastoral and anti-pastoral poems resonate with the beauty and demise of our natural heritage. With the environmental events of the Rocky Mountain West are serving as the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world."

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—David Anthony Martin, founder of Middle Creek Publishing & Audio and MiddleCreek Press, author of Span,Deepening the Map, Bijoux, and The Ground Nest