I'm happy to announce that my full-length poetry collection, The Open Hand of Sky (from Finishing Line Press, Aug 2022) has launched.
I’m especially honored that Shelli Walter's painting, “Shine Through The Spaces,” is featured as the cover art.
Synopsis
The Open Hand of Sky examines personal bonds and the forces that break them. Divided in three parts – fire, sand, trees – this intimate collection explores a sibling bond and shared memories lost to an illness; a marriage that dries up like desert rain and the child that sprang from the turmoil; the speaker’s longing for connection that grows from loneliness and grief. Landscapes roll through this collection like a road trip through Colorado fields, North Dakota farmlands, the craggy hide of West Texas, to the towering trees of Washington. In each place, the speaker keeps an eye fixed on the natural world – her source of comfort and stability, as though nature’s hand will hold her steady against the blowing gales of time and loss.
From poet Leslie Ullman (author of Progress on the Subject of Immensity and Slow Work Through Sand): “The poems in The Open Hand of Sky bear unflinching witness to significant passages in the speaker’s life—loss of a loved brother to meningitis, the unraveling of a marriage, birth of a daughter and its subsequent waves of tenderness and fierce protectiveness, and the aging and loss of parents. Underlying all of this, however, is the poet’s exquisite attunement to the natural world, which renders her at once a perceptive witness and an animal-self easily fused with rock, tree, sun, and desert, inseparable from the elements in their sometimes-patient, sometimes-violent manifestations, and ever sustained by the force of her attention.”
To get a copy
Auntie’s Bookstore — one of Spokane’s best indies — is stocked with signed copies: Auntie's ($19.99 + postage, or pick up if you’re local)
or from Finishing Line Press ($19.99 + postage)
or from Amazon ($19.99 + whatever your shipping arrangement is with this megastore)
Wishing Tree in the South Perry district of Spokane also has copies! Ask at one of the friendly bookstore workers and they’ll show you where it is!
My chapbook, Predictable as Fire, was a finalist in a recent Moonstone Press Chapbook contest, published in 2021.
From poet Laura Read (author of Dresses from the Old Country and Instructions on My Mother’s Funeral): “Connie Wasem Scott’s chapbook, Predictable as Fire, is a stunning and heartbreaking collection of poems that tells the story of her relationship with her brother before and after he suffered a life-changing brain injury. The book moves back and forth in time, stitching together the worlds of Before and After with the sharp and gleaming needle of Scott’s beautiful language. In her poem, “Aubade, with Hand,” she describes how her brother walked three miles in the night to find his way back to the house where he used to live with his wife and sons though he “can’t sustain a thought longer / than lightning.” In every poem, the speaker is using what she has, words, to find her way back to a past that belonged to her and her brother alone and that she has to preserve now on her own while also trying to find a way forward without him. This collection is like the shoebox in my closet where I used to keep my shells: Wasem Scott opens the box, and you can hear the tide rushing in.”
You can purchase a signed copy of my chapbook from the best indie in Spokane — Auntie’s, or you can buy a copy directly from the publisher via Moonstone Art Center's online bookstore: Moonstone Press The chapbook is $10 + postage from either bookstore.
Thank you for supporting my work!
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