Overview

This vibrant and insightful collection celebrates relationships that bring light-strength, resilience, and hope-to our lives. From individuals who inspire us, to those in our communities who surprise us with their resourcefulness, to loved ones whose actions have profound impacts upon us each day, our relationships with others can brighten our paths and illuminate our souls. Published posthumously by her family, Alenda Lux is poet Marilyn Hedgpeth's gentle, loving reminder to cherish the light within each other, ourselves, and the lives we create together.

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9781970735093

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Reviews

""If you sit with the poems of Alenda Lux for a bit, you will come to know Marilyn Hedgpeth, and assuredly that will be worth your time. She is a lover of stories and a wonderful observer of both darkness and light. If you have had brushes with the difficult or dark side of life, then I recommend you get to know Marilyn through this volume. She is not afraid of struggles, or loss, or sickness, or curmudgeons, or frailty, or handicaps, or blindness, or death. She is a healing soul who has seen beauty in disaster, music in a rainstorm, laughter in failure's face, even death giving birth to fresh starts. Her writing reveals darkness as an opportunity for light, and don't we all need that? These poems are a fine and rare gift to anyone who embraces them.""-Bruce Metge, poet and co-author, White Fence ""Alenda Lux is Marilyn Hedgpeth's final collection of poems before her untimely passing. Reading these poems made me realize what a wonderful storyteller she is. Her voice returns with heartfelt thoughts and emotions clearly and directly stated. In narrative lyric poems about 'her people, ' she slips into the lives of her subjects with empathy and intelligence, recognizing that so many of us have important stories to tell. Whether it be someone from her immediate family, the wider family she served as a minister, or from the community just outside her window, she tells these stories with skill and care. Happily, her ironic sense of humor is sprinkled throughout, as if she is winking at the reader to share her point. What she has left us is a collection of wonderful poems. Like Anne Boleyn's attendants in 'Queen Anne's Lace' who give her a cotton ball and tatting needles and tell the doomed woman to 'Make something beautiful for God, ' something that will live beyond her time, Marilyn has left us with a tapestry of poems that honor, love and cherish life on Earth."" -Alan Basting, author of Weathered Man, Apples and Crows, and Nothing Very Sudden Happens Here

Author Information

A native of Charlotte, North Carolina, Marilyn earned a BA in English from Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC and a Master of Divinity from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. She retired as a PC(USA) Minister of Word and Sacrament after preaching/teaching/leading/loving life through the church for twenty-four years, seventeen of them at First Presbyterian Church in Durham, NC. She has published sermons, adult curriculum, and articles for the Presbyterian Church, but since retirement has expanded her creative endeavors to include poetry. Her first poetry book, The Lightness of Reprieve, was published in 2024, and her second, a collaborative collection with her writing group, White Fence, was also published in 2024. Marilyn and husband, Hedge, have three talented children (and spouses) and two grandsons (and two grand dogs) whom they adore. Having lived in Charlotte, Greensboro, Greenville, Atlanta, and Durham for most of her life, she often referred to I-85 as her home street.

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