Blue Between Owls: Blue Chore Coat and Other Collected Poems

In Blue Between Owls, the poems draw their painterly images from the landscape, wildlife, and people of the rural Midwest, and from the Teays River, the ancient underground tributary that flows beneath them all.

In Blue Between Owls, the calls of great-horned owls from the tangled woods become both metaphors for longing and calls to prayer. These poems draw their images and inquiries from the landscape of the rural Midwest, its green seas of corn and soybeans, its great expanse of sky above, and the Teays River, that ancient underground tributary that flows below, informing the way faith might inform a life, giving rise to praise. In the "Migration" poems, which walk with a beloved friend through her final illness, a bird-sown sunflower springs up in the burn pile and is transformed into flame the way we may hope to be transformed into light-bearing beings in this world.