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Magicicada & Other Marvels

by Kathleen Brewin Lewis

Kathleen Brewin Lewis writes about the natural world and family life. In Magicicada and Other Marvels, she gathers the flora and fauna around her into a lyrical collection of poetry that soothes the spirit. This book is a tender testament to the earth's abundance.

POETRY / General
NATURE / General

ISBN: 978-1-956056-55-6 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2022943697

90 pages

Author Biography

Kathleen Brewin Lewis grew up among the moss-draped oaks of Savannah, Georgia, eighteen miles from the Atlantic Ocean, in a land crossed with creeks and rivers. A graduate of Wake Forest University, she received a master of arts in professional writing, with a concentration in creative writing, from Kennesaw State University. Although she now lives in the bustling city of Atlanta, she is grateful to be just minutes from the walking trails beside the Chattahoochee River and from the roads that lead to timbered hikes in the north Georgia and North Carolina mountains. She and her husband, Jeff, have two grown children, Ben and Rosalee. A Georgia Master Naturalist, Kathleen is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Fluent in Rivers and July’s Thick Kingdom. Magicicada & Other Marvels is her first full-length collection.

Endorsements

“Magicicada & Other Marvels is the work of a mature poet attuned to the spirituality and grace of the natural world. These meditative, tenderly courageous poems are fueled by profound sensitivity, a less-is-more approach, and exquisite lyricism. For a miraculous moment, they make us feel inspired, sheltered, un-diminished by our mortality, suddenly ‘fluent in rivers.’”
—Andrea Jurjević, winner of the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize

“In Magicicada & Other Marvels, Kathleen Brewin Lewis resolves to ‘collect the harder things’—abundance, mercy, bliss, radiance, belonging, even mystery and meaning. She situates her voice—which is both solitary and collective—along rivers, marshes, and trails, ever mindful of how ‘[t]here is no turning back, only turning,’ since every moment, every word, stands on the brink of revelation. She may be only ‘a speck moving between / sunbaked rocks and hard places, / toward a remnant river,’ but thankfully she is on the move, insatiable, vigilant, heading deeper into the landscapes; and ‘[e]ach step is a lightening.’”
— Jeff Hardin, author of A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being

“I don’t know how this can happen—how poem after poem can startle the reader awake, once more and then again, to the lushness and magic of the natural world, to its myriad dangers and beauties—but in Magicicada, this happens. It seems to me less a collection of poems than a spell, a kind of enchantment that Kathleen Brewin Lewis casts over the reader with deft grace, with tenderness.’”--
—Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem

Articles and Reviews