JOURNEY BREAD: New & Selected Poems by Ruth Thompson
Publication Date: August 1, 2024
Paperback, 128 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-77-6
The title of this collection suggests sustenance, and the poetry within certainly supplies that; but it is more an account of the journey itself, the journey of an accomplished poet back through her life’s work. In her preface Ruth Thompson admits that what she first conceived as a conventional “new & selected” volume became something else once she allowed her poems to become what they needed to be, sometimes radically different from how they began, and to “gather themselves into their own pattern” so that “In the end, this book has become a memoir of sorts, a final dance with some old and new poems, and a late-in-life reflection on the journey that brought me here.” This process is thus like the experience of the women she describes in her poem “Journeying West” across the prairie, a trail marked by the things abandoned along the way as unnecessary burdens, “the broken axles of memory and desire” until “in the end / women leave behind everything / but what is in their heads.” What is left in Ruth Thompson’s head is the bread of poetry, and it is sustenance indeed.
Praise for Ruth Thompson & Journey Bread
Journey Bread is the Viaticum, the last meal, the bread on the tongue of the deceased as she makes her way to the Other World. But Ruth Thompson’s rendering of this offering is very much about life, a vigorous and fascinating life, in poems that are energetic and vital – a woman’s Hijra in words that marvel great distances: from anger and despair, through myth and memory, magic, outcry, love, and into joy, into wholeness. This is a wonderful book by a powerful and accomplished writer.
—Frank Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous & The Poems of Renata Ferreira
Aliveness abounds in all its generous and difficult graces in the poems of Journey Bread. In words that dance like colored silk and shine dark as crows, Ruth Thompson holds up beauty from the depths of oneness and from bright reaches “where flying cannot go.” And in the in-between where we live—a “dog grinning over his shoulder, jaybird yammering like no tomorrow,” “a wing of rain / coming in slantwise under clouds,” visitations from crones and snow leopards, whales and crows—reminders that help is all around us in our long learning of gladness in the world.
—Diane Gilliam, author of Kettle Bottom, Dreadful Wind & Rain, & Linney Stepp
Reflecting on a long and well-traveled life—in spirit as well as geography—Ruth Thompson chronicles wrong turns, demon wrestling, love lost and found, and the ongoing revelation of belonging to the natural world. Journey Bread moves through personal history via cultural stories: myths, fairy tales, legends, from the Oracle of Delphi to the White Queen to Mae West. But this journey arrives at a setting forth as sure as a summing up. She writes in "Crazing":
Yes. At last. It’s me.
Hallelujah!
—George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate (2015-2016), author of Back to the Light
Ruth Thompson’s Journey Bread is a radical book – a recollection, exploration, and re-evaluation of a fully-engaged presence in a richness of styles and forms from a master poet. From narrative memories to dramatic monologues, from Greek to Sumerian to re-cast feminist folktales, from lyrics of love and nature to the spiritual world, the journey of this necessary collection is epic and the bread—the poetry – is its staff. Journey Bread moves me in many ways, through Thompson’s unswerving devotion to the truth of a singular life “singing the song of being alive.”
—Philip Terman, author of My Blossoming Everything, This Crazy Devotion, & more
About the Author
Ruth Thompson is a poet and a conscious channel. She is the author of five books, most recently Whale Fall & Black Sage (poetry; 2019), and Quickwater Oracles: Conversations & Meditations (channels; 2021), which won Hoffer, Montaigne, and First Generation book awards in 2022 and was First Runner-Up for the Hoffer Grand Prize.
Ruth began writing poetry in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her poems are joyous, fierce, witty, and celebratory. Praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Frank X. Gaspar, and others, they have won many national awards and Pushcart nominations.
Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai’i in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by revered dancer Shizuno Nasu of Japan in 2012. Ruth also performed with cellist Lee Zimmerman in Whitefish, Montana in 2019.
A native Californian, Ruth has a BA from Stanford University and a doctorate in English from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, librarian, book editor, and college dean. She now lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell, teaches poetry and meditation, and is the publisher of Saddle Road Press. A short video of Ruth talking about her work is at www.ruththompson.net
Publication Date: August 1, 2024
Paperback, 128 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-77-6
The title of this collection suggests sustenance, and the poetry within certainly supplies that; but it is more an account of the journey itself, the journey of an accomplished poet back through her life’s work. In her preface Ruth Thompson admits that what she first conceived as a conventional “new & selected” volume became something else once she allowed her poems to become what they needed to be, sometimes radically different from how they began, and to “gather themselves into their own pattern” so that “In the end, this book has become a memoir of sorts, a final dance with some old and new poems, and a late-in-life reflection on the journey that brought me here.” This process is thus like the experience of the women she describes in her poem “Journeying West” across the prairie, a trail marked by the things abandoned along the way as unnecessary burdens, “the broken axles of memory and desire” until “in the end / women leave behind everything / but what is in their heads.” What is left in Ruth Thompson’s head is the bread of poetry, and it is sustenance indeed.
Praise for Ruth Thompson & Journey Bread
Journey Bread is the Viaticum, the last meal, the bread on the tongue of the deceased as she makes her way to the Other World. But Ruth Thompson’s rendering of this offering is very much about life, a vigorous and fascinating life, in poems that are energetic and vital – a woman’s Hijra in words that marvel great distances: from anger and despair, through myth and memory, magic, outcry, love, and into joy, into wholeness. This is a wonderful book by a powerful and accomplished writer.
—Frank Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous & The Poems of Renata Ferreira
Aliveness abounds in all its generous and difficult graces in the poems of Journey Bread. In words that dance like colored silk and shine dark as crows, Ruth Thompson holds up beauty from the depths of oneness and from bright reaches “where flying cannot go.” And in the in-between where we live—a “dog grinning over his shoulder, jaybird yammering like no tomorrow,” “a wing of rain / coming in slantwise under clouds,” visitations from crones and snow leopards, whales and crows—reminders that help is all around us in our long learning of gladness in the world.
—Diane Gilliam, author of Kettle Bottom, Dreadful Wind & Rain, & Linney Stepp
Reflecting on a long and well-traveled life—in spirit as well as geography—Ruth Thompson chronicles wrong turns, demon wrestling, love lost and found, and the ongoing revelation of belonging to the natural world. Journey Bread moves through personal history via cultural stories: myths, fairy tales, legends, from the Oracle of Delphi to the White Queen to Mae West. But this journey arrives at a setting forth as sure as a summing up. She writes in "Crazing":
Yes. At last. It’s me.
Hallelujah!
—George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate (2015-2016), author of Back to the Light
Ruth Thompson’s Journey Bread is a radical book – a recollection, exploration, and re-evaluation of a fully-engaged presence in a richness of styles and forms from a master poet. From narrative memories to dramatic monologues, from Greek to Sumerian to re-cast feminist folktales, from lyrics of love and nature to the spiritual world, the journey of this necessary collection is epic and the bread—the poetry – is its staff. Journey Bread moves me in many ways, through Thompson’s unswerving devotion to the truth of a singular life “singing the song of being alive.”
—Philip Terman, author of My Blossoming Everything, This Crazy Devotion, & more
About the Author
Ruth Thompson is a poet and a conscious channel. She is the author of five books, most recently Whale Fall & Black Sage (poetry; 2019), and Quickwater Oracles: Conversations & Meditations (channels; 2021), which won Hoffer, Montaigne, and First Generation book awards in 2022 and was First Runner-Up for the Hoffer Grand Prize.
Ruth began writing poetry in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her poems are joyous, fierce, witty, and celebratory. Praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Frank X. Gaspar, and others, they have won many national awards and Pushcart nominations.
Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai’i in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by revered dancer Shizuno Nasu of Japan in 2012. Ruth also performed with cellist Lee Zimmerman in Whitefish, Montana in 2019.
A native Californian, Ruth has a BA from Stanford University and a doctorate in English from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, librarian, book editor, and college dean. She now lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell, teaches poetry and meditation, and is the publisher of Saddle Road Press. A short video of Ruth talking about her work is at www.ruththompson.net
Publication Date: August 1, 2024
Paperback, 128 pages
ISBN: 978-1-956782-77-6
The title of this collection suggests sustenance, and the poetry within certainly supplies that; but it is more an account of the journey itself, the journey of an accomplished poet back through her life’s work. In her preface Ruth Thompson admits that what she first conceived as a conventional “new & selected” volume became something else once she allowed her poems to become what they needed to be, sometimes radically different from how they began, and to “gather themselves into their own pattern” so that “In the end, this book has become a memoir of sorts, a final dance with some old and new poems, and a late-in-life reflection on the journey that brought me here.” This process is thus like the experience of the women she describes in her poem “Journeying West” across the prairie, a trail marked by the things abandoned along the way as unnecessary burdens, “the broken axles of memory and desire” until “in the end / women leave behind everything / but what is in their heads.” What is left in Ruth Thompson’s head is the bread of poetry, and it is sustenance indeed.
Praise for Ruth Thompson & Journey Bread
Journey Bread is the Viaticum, the last meal, the bread on the tongue of the deceased as she makes her way to the Other World. But Ruth Thompson’s rendering of this offering is very much about life, a vigorous and fascinating life, in poems that are energetic and vital – a woman’s Hijra in words that marvel great distances: from anger and despair, through myth and memory, magic, outcry, love, and into joy, into wholeness. This is a wonderful book by a powerful and accomplished writer.
—Frank Gaspar, author of Late Rapturous & The Poems of Renata Ferreira
Aliveness abounds in all its generous and difficult graces in the poems of Journey Bread. In words that dance like colored silk and shine dark as crows, Ruth Thompson holds up beauty from the depths of oneness and from bright reaches “where flying cannot go.” And in the in-between where we live—a “dog grinning over his shoulder, jaybird yammering like no tomorrow,” “a wing of rain / coming in slantwise under clouds,” visitations from crones and snow leopards, whales and crows—reminders that help is all around us in our long learning of gladness in the world.
—Diane Gilliam, author of Kettle Bottom, Dreadful Wind & Rain, & Linney Stepp
Reflecting on a long and well-traveled life—in spirit as well as geography—Ruth Thompson chronicles wrong turns, demon wrestling, love lost and found, and the ongoing revelation of belonging to the natural world. Journey Bread moves through personal history via cultural stories: myths, fairy tales, legends, from the Oracle of Delphi to the White Queen to Mae West. But this journey arrives at a setting forth as sure as a summing up. She writes in "Crazing":
Yes. At last. It’s me.
Hallelujah!
—George Ella Lyon, Kentucky Poet Laureate (2015-2016), author of Back to the Light
Ruth Thompson’s Journey Bread is a radical book – a recollection, exploration, and re-evaluation of a fully-engaged presence in a richness of styles and forms from a master poet. From narrative memories to dramatic monologues, from Greek to Sumerian to re-cast feminist folktales, from lyrics of love and nature to the spiritual world, the journey of this necessary collection is epic and the bread—the poetry – is its staff. Journey Bread moves me in many ways, through Thompson’s unswerving devotion to the truth of a singular life “singing the song of being alive.”
—Philip Terman, author of My Blossoming Everything, This Crazy Devotion, & more
About the Author
Ruth Thompson is a poet and a conscious channel. She is the author of five books, most recently Whale Fall & Black Sage (poetry; 2019), and Quickwater Oracles: Conversations & Meditations (channels; 2021), which won Hoffer, Montaigne, and First Generation book awards in 2022 and was First Runner-Up for the Hoffer Grand Prize.
Ruth began writing poetry in her fifties, after freeing herself from an abusive marriage, about which she wrote in Woman With Crows. Her poems are joyous, fierce, witty, and celebratory. Praised by Stanley Plumly, Philip Terman, Frank X. Gaspar, and others, they have won many national awards and Pushcart nominations.
Whale Fall was choreographed and performed in Hilo, Hawai’i in 2018. Here Along Cazenovia Creek was choreographed and performed by revered dancer Shizuno Nasu of Japan in 2012. Ruth also performed with cellist Lee Zimmerman in Whitefish, Montana in 2019.
A native Californian, Ruth has a BA from Stanford University and a doctorate in English from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, librarian, book editor, and college dean. She now lives in Ithaca, New York with her husband, anthropologist-writer Don Mitchell, teaches poetry and meditation, and is the publisher of Saddle Road Press. A short video of Ruth talking about her work is at www.ruththompson.net