Jeff Reed

Season of Dragonflies

Jeff Reed's latest collection of poems Season of Dragonflies gathers together poems written over the last decade and offers close encounters with finely distilled moments stretching through a season of significant change in both its welcome and unwelcome varieties. From the marriage of children to the death of his father, from the exhilaration and agony of spiritual faith to the long plodding nerve sustaining the twists and turns of everyday life, these poems offer a wide forage through fields of human becoming. These poems are music in the mouth, accessible to the non-specialist. As fresh takes on the familiar, they offer a doorway to see and feel something alive nudging us toward joy. "Come, you arcane seekers of light, the sunset shadows behind every rock are ready to tell their stories."

In Season of Dragonflies, Jeff Reed writes into the liminalities of what is and what isn't here. I love the span of the poems – how they embrace spaces between oppositions. These are poems that invite us to see both "the underneath of things" and "the inevitable bursting outward," poems that honor the stuckness of "old weathered boots nailed through the soles to the cold ground" and the "freedom of the samara spinning" in the wind. And though I appreciate Jeff's themes – love, time, emergence, the daily and the divine – I love just as much the music and movement in these poems. Like Hopkins, Jeff uses language as an instrument – the words sing off the page as if they long to be spoken. Here you'll find blessings, prayers, invitations – and poem after poem that just might "carry you all the way home." – Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Author of Hush and Naked for Tea.

Kore on the Trail of the Tree Keepers

An evil queen and her salivating hounds are on the hunt. A fugitive young girl and her owl companion flee across the Wilderness of Zin. Will they elude the queen’s grasp and reach the refuge of distant Mt. Horeb before they are captured? How will they find their way through the strange enchanted landscape? Enter into the cadence and imaginative world of this epic poem filled with wisdom and adventure. A tale that stands in the tradition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Kóre on the Trail of the Tree Keepers offers a gritty vision of the virtuous life that can serve as a compass in today’s moral wilderness. Available in hardback, paperback, and Kindle versions.

Estuarial

What happens when you take two wildly different things, suddenly throw them together into a tight space on a small page, shake vigorously and closely observe the mingling? Estuarial is the poetic test-tube for just such an experiment, and the results are sometimes delightful, sometimes prophetic, always eye-opening!