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Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona. She has published several chapbooks and is the author of 12 full-length collections, the most recent of which are In A Few Minutes Before Later; Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the Griffin International Poetry Prize; and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, winner of the Northern California Book Award. In 2024, she published her first book of prose essays, Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality. More about this author >
From the publisher:
Building on previous volumes about seasons, days and minutes, Brenda Hillman concludes her masterful quartet about time with an ecological journey into a family home of the mid-20th century. Here, magical poems explore rooms as opportunities for dream, and domestic objects as the dream-shapes where culture and imagination inform each other. In that way, the poet celebrates the layered lives of children and adults, including, strikingly, the life of her mother, a native of Brazil whose presence intimately links the processes of inner vision and daily tasks. These poems are personal and collective; they braid the spiritual, the scientific, the political, and the visionary. Short spare lyrics are placed beside longer pieces; small photos add to the visual structures of the pages. One long prose poem explores the child’s neurological anxiety and the awakening of mid-century environmental consciousness, while another is a meditation on women’s domestic work with textiles and the rhetoric of literary repetition. The closing sequence gives homage to unlikely intersections of humans with non-human lives, including dust mites, moths, and mycorrhizal roots.
