Available now! Order below.
The Brightest Rock received Honorable Mention from the North Carolina Poetry Society in the 2018 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Congratulations to winner Kerri French from Nashville, for Every Room in the Body!
Review:
“Kelly Lenox lures us into caves, takes us bungee jumping in New Zealand, nature-loving in Appalachia and Oregon, and on an extended tour of Slovenia to visit holy ground and other places…One of Lenox’s great strengths as a writer is her ability to involve the reader in the adventures.”
—Richard Allen Taylor, in Main Street Rag, Vol. 23 No.3, Summer 2018
Early praise:
Robert Vivian, author of Mystery My Country:
“Kelly Lenox’s brave, beautiful book is full of wonders—a heart made of soapstone, a bungee cord freefall, hope itself outfitted with talons. What a rare and lovely thing to dive deeper into the mysterious essence of a woman’s being in poem after poem, finding within her own meditations the greatest gifts that poetry can give us, that she gives us—awe, humor, and wisdom in the natural splendor all around us. And The Brightest Rock is a splendor itself, deserving front and center standing on anyone’s bookshelf.”
Natasha Sajé, author of Vivarium:
“The Brightest Rock shines with hard-won truths, such as,
‘In complete darkness,
eyes invent light.’
And, ‘In the Country of the bone Flute,’ upon feeling a ‘thundering bass wind tasting of glacier,’ she tells that wind,
‘I’m hollow—
I’m hollow—
Sing in me.’
One reason we read is to learn how to live, and Kelly Lenox is a wise—and joyful—teacher.”
Richard Jackson, author of Retrievals:
“In one poem, Kelly Lenox observes that
‘the bird in the sycamore
still doesn’t know
it’s asking the wrong question.’
And indeed that question is behind all these poems, which keep probing the essential questions of our lives. It is not the philosophy, but the quiet and impeccable skill through which she guides us that make this book so good, bringing together what Dickinson called the outer and inner worlds. ‘The hopping crow traces a path as jagged as my pulse,’ she says in another poem. There won’t be any easy answers here because this is a real poet whose powers are everywhere in evidence as she negotiates a ‘Slippery World.’ If you want real poetry, this is it.”
Order a signed copy directly from me, using PayPal.
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$15.00 + $4.50 S/H via First Class mail.
Other options:
- Ask your favorite bookstore, such as Powell’s, to order it from Ingram (ISBN 9781625492241).
- Use Indiebound to order from a bookstore near you.
- Word Tech Editions, an imprint of Word Tech Communications, has links to order from Barnes and Noble, and Amazon.
Book design by Dave Wofford of Horse and Buggy Press.