Overview

Still Life gathers people, creatures, and landscapes in poetic still-life vignettes reminiscent of traditional still-life paintings, which capture the landscape as a memento mori, ""a memento of mortality."" Through free verse, form, narrative, and prose poems, Megan Huwa recounts her body's decline in 2012 at age twenty-seven due to a rare condition that has ushered her into a life of suffering, uprooting her and her husband from her family's fifth-generation Colorado farm, and stilling them in a condo in Southern California. The four-part collection paints life's mercurial seasons, with underlying redemptive threads. The poetic vignettes serve as a keen act of observance and remembrance, beholding Life, the life to come, and the life all around through the miracle of a broken step, a new cross-section of mercy, the life in another's dance, the overlooked beheld, the wondrous done in secret, the life amid loss, the land resown, and the promised home glorified.

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Reviews

""Still Life is a vulnerable and brave work. Megan Huwa has faced tremendous difficulties, and in the midst of them, two remarkable things have happened: she has been drawn to Christ, and her eyes have been opened to the dignity present in the lives of other people. These writings are a record of what it looks like when the foundation of a person's faith is tested, and it stands up to the storm."" --Matt Wheeler, Singer-songwriter ""Impressed with tender remembrance and longing through quiet observations that speak volumes about the nuances of life in the face of unexpected weather, Megan's poetry collection, Still Life, is a masterpiece of pastoral fine art, imbued with a colorful resilience that compels readers to embrace the human ache of illness while still embodying the intimate details of hope that whisper, 'hold on, pain ends; there is so much more light coming.'"" --Alexis Leigh Ragan, Poet ""Megan's collection captures the ache of today's brokenness and the hope for tomorrow's restoration. As windows into her own still world, Huwa's picture of a snail or a row of corn slows us to feel our own frailties, yet with a divinely feathered lightness. Her own personal pains are tangible but beautifully submitted to a place where 'grief holds no eternity.' Still Life is an intimate story of waiting to be made whole."" --Lee Kiblinger, author of All the Untils ""In her debut collection, Megan Huwa invites us into her Still Life which, filled with the specifics of her own experiences, bubbles up a universal desire in us all: that of a life well and fully lived. Huwa's poems are drenched in the wonder of the mundane--sitting in a coffee shop, drawing landscapes as a child, yearly birthday calls--and are there to remind us that tiny miracles are worth savoring . . . even when the unexpected happens, even when pain is also part of our daily lives. From Colorado to California to another world our eyes are yet to see, this poetry collection will take you on a journey that will remind you of what it means to treasure (as the great Mary Oliver would say) your one wild and precious life."" --Rosa Lía Gilbert, author of Under the Samán Tree ""Megan Huwa's Still Life is an invitation to a soul-stirring journey. I am deaf and know what it is to struggle with words beyond reach. Yet Megan's vivid imagery and gentle honesty reached me. Her description of farming as 'the art of sustaining life amid the elements' gripped my heart, and the metaphor continues to shape how I face hardship. I've shared these poems with women in deep pain, and holy moments followed."" --Deb Entsminger, Collegiate Initiatives Director, The Navigators

Author Information

Megan Huwa is a poet, author, and former higher education editor and instructor. A rare health condition keeps her and her husband from living near her family's fifth-generation Colorado farm, so her writing reaches for home, both temporal and eternal, and beholds life amidst suffering. She holds a BA in English from Colorado State University and an MA in English from the University of Northern Colorado.

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