O Garden-Dweller

This poetry collection reimagines the classic poetic text of the Song of Songs and considers its terrain of love and belonging in connection with how we seek out the divine today in our own backyards, literally and figuratively. The Song of Songs, found in Hebrew and Christian scripture, conveys in poetic form the intimate love between the bride and the groom, interpreted often in tradition as the human soul and the divine. The Song captures the spiritual journey of the soul toward its God through expression of the delight which the soul and the Beloved find in one another and their garden, the soul's despair in the absence of the Beloved and the consequent experience of loss and pain, and finally the union of the soul and Beloved. This poetry chapbook is inspired by a garden and its residents, a historic drought, a wildfire and its aftermath, experience of the divine in the everyday, and the Song of Songs. Several of the poems echo moments found in the Song and other scripture, and the poems are generally arranged according to the arc of the Song.