The Dividings, Poems by Kimberly L. Becker

The Dividings takes the reader on a journey from “setting out” to “crossing over,” with junctures along the way that demand or invite attention and decision:
 
No Easy Way
deep is calling unto deep
 
These places where decisions
lean in to see what you will do
These places where you stop to build
a cairn of what you hope is truth
 
There is no guardrail here
Blue on blue,
the depths call and echo
The deep pools swirl with promise and menace
 
You can’t cast lots
there is no easy way
You must forge through, trying this way, brambled and bracken,
and that, burdened by boulders
 
Far off: a green gap

Sample Poems by Kimberly Becker
 
"Kimberly L. Becker’s The Dividings threads a substantial journey of truth and challenging matters, richly invoking Blue Ridge crests to shoulder balance of parallel planes at either side. Becker deftly secures the way in half-hitch knotted lead trails while tying branches down to bend them supple, mapping out our course-way through decisions she must make. It is cartography, this book, every area experience gives narrative steeped in poetic device with the capacity of harboring human in the between. This is a volume that brings me back where I am most home and takes me unexpected places in the quick flight of return. This invitation is a mountain of verse, well worth the climb. A beautiful work."—Allison Hedge Coke
 
"In her second collection, The Dividings, Kimberly L. Becker’s speaker shores up and shares Source power before choosing new routes, personal and poetic, all the while acknowledging the older maps and the two-legged and four-legged relatives who traveled them. Across divisions of mountains, rivers, cultures, and years—'amplifying the vastness' of 'the long now'—these poems track migrations of the natural world and its human hearts. Ultimately The Dividings is less about separation than coming together, less arbitrary boundaries than crossings into shelter. These poems leave us paths to wander long after the trails converge."—Chip Livingston
 
"Kimberly Becker has written a lucid, musical book of journeys, of trails that divide in confusion, always heading into mountains searching for the precious gaps that allow easy passage. She tells us of the danger and failure of love and how love bleeds, of death and the lessons it teaches us that we don’t learn. Above all, Becker has written a stunning account of survival, even when we may not want to. Drawing on her Cherokee and German ancestors, on the Hebrew Kabalah and upon fairy tales, she has written about the origin and birth of story with all its power to overcome the grimmest of experiences with joy. This book is good medicine. Swallow it whole."—Linda Rodriguez

ISBN: 9781625490643, 136 pages

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