Part American history, part poetic memoir, part multifaceted and lyrical study of tender human life, Jacqueline Kudler's Ripenings is a trajectory, a richly detailed arco iris of ancestors, intimate family, lifelong loves, inevitable loss. "Revelation begins in attention," the poet writes, and whether that attention manifests here in paeans to New York, to life in Northern California's landscape, or to the people who have accompanied her through her life, love is what shines through these poems, these ripenings—this book is a gift of love laid at our feet. Her third (and final) collection of her poetry, Ripenings follows this award-winning poet's acclaimed volumes, The Sacred Precinct and Easing into Dark. "In Ripenings, Jacqueline Kudler's rich imagery and love of language celebrate the people and places that have inhabited her world. Nature commands a major presence in these pages: its bliss and blight, how it reaches out to us, offering a place for healing to occur. Death is also here, in poems limning the long California drought or addressing now-dead long-time friends and family members. Kudler writes, What more can anyone ask but that Death, the ever-dependable friend, will know I'm ready before I do, will steal into my room while I'm deep in dreams and lay his glacial gift at my feet, so gently, so tenderly, that I'll never wake at all. These poems are brilliantly alive!" —Lily Iona MacKenzie, author of California Dreaming

Poetry. "This book is life in itself. Here, a close self-regard; there, a wider regard of the world--each poem precise, often scalpel sharp, always keen in its music, always wise. SACRED PRECINCT is a large book, every poem in it earned"--Gerald Fleming. Jacqueline Kudler lives in Sausalito, California, and teaches classes in writing and literature at the college of Marin, Kentfield. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary reviews and anthologies. An avid hiker, she published Walking from Inn to Inn (East Wind Press) in 1986, and cowrites a local hiking column for the Pacific Sun newspaper. SACRED PRECINCT is her first collection of poems.

Poetry. Jacqueline Kudler's new collection of poems traces a delicate and tensile arc. Poignant, unafraid, and disarming in its evocation of the trajectory of one human life, EASING INTO DARK is a return to that life, and for Kudler such return is "a way of realigning memory," a longing not for the life unlived but for the life lived: years growing up in New York, her engagement with imagination and nature, the death of her husband, and the aftermath: the sources of beauty and richness that remain.