We are pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Meridian by Julie Sumner (November 2023), winner of the inaugural Wildhouse Poetry chapbook contest. The 2023 chapbook contest, con/verge/nces, was judged by the award-winning poet Jane Hirshfield, whose work and ethos exemplifies Wildhouse Poetry’s intention to publish poems that point toward our connectedness with the wider fabric of life, poems whose epiphanies remind us that our lives are subtler and more complex than we imagine.
Hirshfield writes of Meridian,
“Julie Sumner offers readers a chapbook of quietly particular observations and tensile strengths. Body, speech, and mind are equally present, in poems that reference philosophy and photons, hold archeology and a patient’s post-surgical staples, present a sly flash of the comic and an empathy extending to humans, vegetables, birds, and one almost-extinct monk seal looking back at those who marvel at its arrival. The ethics of interconnection inform each page, along with the wonder of transformation, both natural and human. In one poem, a glassblower’s globe makes of its single, held human breath a world. The ethics of interconnection inform each page, along with the wonder of transformation, both natural and human. Just so, these pages conjure and hold in hand, eyes, and ear the ranges of our human lives: our shapes, fates, forms, choices, pausings, ponderings; our borrowed feathers, our mysteries, our resilience.”
Meridian is Sumner’s first published collection of poetry, and her voice is urgently necessary in these times. Trained as a nurse, Julie began her encounter with poetry by using it as a tool to process difficult experiences in the hospital. “Poetry was something that got me through the day,” she said in a recent interview. “I carried phrases in my head that I would repeat to myself again and again.”
Sumner’s love affair with poetry began when she picked up a book of Rilke poems by chance. “I was just astonished. I thought, how has this dead German guy been inside my head reading my thoughts? After that I couldn’t stop reading poetry. I picked up everything I could find. I would sneak over to the Vanderbilt English Department at night and go to poetry readings—I would be in my lab coat with all my stethoscopes and things like that, sitting in the corner.” Sumner describes her writing practice now as “more of a listening practice,” an effort to “try to get beyond myself.”
Today, in addition to her own writing, Sumner teaches poetry to healthcare workers. She received a Sharp Grant from Humanities TN to teach the nurses, doctors, and epidemiologists on the frontlines of the pandemic. “It was very personal to me when I started teaching poetry to folks who were in healthcare because it is so potent. These folks don’t have a lot of bandwidth, so poetry is great because it gets down to the marrow of what it means to be human, and it’s portable because it’s so small that you can carry it with you wherever you go.”
“A poem is a whole thing” she said. “So much in our society is fragmented. A poem is a beautiful whole thing that you can sit with, and it can become a part of you. That’s very necessary in our world right now.”
Wildhouse Poetry will also publish Space that Carries Light Forever by Robert Rice, the chapbook chosen as first runner-up in the con/verge/nces contest. Rice’s work also embodies the Wildhouse mission to bring transformative spiritual insights to readers for whom traditional religious expressions may not fit. When asked in a recent interview about the relationship between his writing and his spiritual practice, Rice said, “a good poem contains echoes of the entire cosmos. I’m talking about the kind of poem that makes the hair on your neck stand up, as Emily Dickinson said. When you read a poem like that it’s like plucking the string of the Net of Indra—you feel the vibrations extend out infinitely. To touch one filament with a poem like that is to set the whole web quivering.” Rice’s chapbook will be published in Spring 2024.
