The Church of This World

With her eloquent voice and strong lyrical vision, Greenwald moves readers through roadsides, ponds, and coastal towns, bearing witness to what survives at the edges of love and loss, memory and grief. This collection traces a journey through life in which nature acts as both companion and witness. Music, movement, and silence recur throughout Greenwald's work, offering beauty and awe amid vulnerability and change. The Church of This World is a body of work about listening closely to what surrounds us, the breath and echo of who we are, who we once were, and what remains. -Tammy Smith, social worker and award-winning poetIn The Church of This World, Greenwald introduces the reader to familiars from the natural world: a vixen, a fiddler crab, a humpback whale, a great blue heron. She writes with tender observation, then mirrors pieces of herself and perhaps the reader as well, in what she sees. "White egret / like the shadow of breath - / I draw you in gray ink above / the running water of the page." She recalls the comforts of the natural world while navigating illness and death within the walls of hospitals and a rehab center. A caged and speechless parrot she encounters foils dramatically with the wildlife in her beginning poems. In the final section of the work, Greenwald writes ekphrastic poems (based on other artists' work) and connects herself to painters and paintings well beyond the salt-marsh life. The entire cast of characters blends harmoniously through Greenwald's imagery and tender recollection. -Michelle Ortega, author, When You Ask Me, Why Paris?The Church of This World offers poems in communion with Cape Cod, with art in far-flung places, and closer to home, poems about grief and love. The author takes us to harbor, woods, estuary. In a poem of mourning, she laments "I've been grasping this nettle / of grief so long / it's grown into my hand." But she also gives us love poems. Her voice, lyrical while conversational, with moments of darkness and touches of humor, belongs to a warm-hearted poet. -Maxine Susman, author, My Mother's Medicine and Northern Swim

Pages: 64, Paperback, Kelsay Books