Overview

""Begin here,"" says Bethany Lee, in her inspirational new collection, Etude for Belonging. ""Now is the time for us to take courage."" And as you answer this invitation, you will find courage indeed, here among musings on galaxies and trillium, shipwrecks and spinning wheels, here where there is room for broken hearts, for healing, and for hope. This book takes us on an uncharted course ""out where the sea is always/turning into sky"" and steadily guides us back to the love at the center, back to the place we all belong, ""which is here/which is together.""

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9781594980756

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Reviews

Vital, beautiful questions spin like planets in Bethany Lee's Etude for Belonging, circling around the miraculous sun of love. As readers, we are spun lovingly with her as she asks, What does it cost to fall in love with the world? This is a welcoming book, a book of Yes that makes room for us all. It is a necessary answer to pain and destruction. May it carry, astonish, and change you. Annie Lighthart, author of Pax, Iron String, and Lantern These poems practice the knack / of seeing the essence, which is something we need in this world. Behind commerce, beyond striving, on a different path than ambition, moments of waking keep appearing in this book like sunlit arenas in a dark wood or a dream that lifts you out of sleep or a blossoming strike of notes on the harp. Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar Bethany is a curator of quiet spaces. She gently points us to the center, to the swirling heart that binds us / all in place, and whispers, This could be the better. Even if there may come all I fear / and several horrible things I failed to consider, this is a book to soothe and inspire. Joann Renee Boswell, author of Cosmic Pockets and poetry editor for Untold Volumes Bethany Lee's poems speak plainly of the storms, pain, and hungers of daily life, offering a profound hope for transformation. Even so, Hope is manual labor, she writes. Get right in there and mix up a batch. These tender poems accompany the reader as they turn to this work. Jennifer L. Hollis, music-thanatologist and author of Music at the End of Life: Easing the Pain and Preparing the Passage Bethany offers us a world that is real in the pain and grief, and alluring in the possibility of available beauty. She invites you to stand near a window and sing in the mystery. Don't resist! Stand by this window. As you wait / there will be transformation. Peg Edera, author of Love is Deeper than Distance: Poems of love, death, a little sex, ALS, dementia, and the widow's life thereafter Bethany Lee's Etude for Belonging gives me hope at a time when it is most needed. Like the trees about which she writes in Reaching Out, each poem in this new collection offers profound connection to Lee and to the world she inhabits. I'm grateful for the sense of loving acceptance and community Lee crafts through her beautiful words-words that convey to the reader that We can stand together. Melanie Springer Mock, author of Worthy: Finding Yourself in a World Expecting Someone Else Like her beautiful first collection, The Breath Between, Lee's Etude for Belonging manages to be simple and luxurious at the same time, hiding breathtaking and often daring choices in the spaces between words or lines, like a seamstress using solid gold thread on interior hems. Benjamin Gorman, author of The Sum of Our Gods and Don't Read This Book Bethany will take your hand, gently beckoning, You're not doing courage wrong, if it doesn't feel brave. She'll ask you to stop and look at the stars, giving you enough space to let your sighs slip from your body. Then, when you are quiet enough to feel the heartbeat of the world, she'll whisper in your ear, How long can you suspend your disbelief? Follow the notes of her song; dance together on the shoreline of creation. juniper klatt, author of I was raised in a house of water and I wrote this naked

Author Information

Bethany Lee lives and writes in Lafayette, Oregon, drawing inspiration from her travels by sea, her experiences as a hospice harpist, and her work as a choral accompanist and Quaker minister. She makes a home at the edge of the woods with her husband, Bryan, with whom she has two grown children.

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