The Wild Essential

From "You Are a Mountain" to "Songbird," The Wild Essential "covers, no, seals, no, reclaims" what it means to be human, to love, to be flawed, to be alive. Claudine Nash assures us that "there is earth in you" and that we can "feel the infinite within." As she writes in the title poem: "loosen these concepts that limit and bind, touch only my truest skin." That is what her words do. They let us forget our names, the labels, the places and day we've come from. We find through her wisdom, kindness and grace how nature lives within us and what it means to feel a deeper, more beautiful rain.

Julia Klatt Singer, Author of Untranslatable, A Tangled Path to Heaven and In the Dreamed of Places

Claudine Nash invites her readers to return to what is natural and instinctual, and to use these lessons in trueness to live. With reflection and awareness, we find ourselves suppressing societal chatter and self-doubt; then, we see ourselves being empowered from the basis of just being our true selves. From the ozone to morning coffee, mountains to motherhood, The Wild Essential takes us to the roots of our identity so that we may flourish beyond barriers. This collection of poetry is a tender but powerful ride of self-exploration and self-acceptance through memories, experience, and forgiveness. At the end of this ride on which Claudine takes us, we acquire the tools to accept the beauty of all that makes us who we are.

Mercy Tullis-Bukhari, Author of Smoke

The Wild Essential is itself a continual act of healing reconnection with the authentic self. We are invited on every page into Nash's discoveries of fresh nuances of mystery and connection with the self she addresses directly in the waterside meditation "Sometimes Before It Storms" "Dear, you / give me such grief / for disappearing / into the ocean, // but tell me, // without this, // how else could / I ever offer you / any fruit?" We are reintroduced to a world that lives for itself, and in so doing allows us a mirror of our own true natures. Yet, though this speaker's paradoxical grounding in the movements between inner and natural mysteries is apparent and uncontrived, the reader is still allowed in poems like "I Keep Checking My Samsung Galaxy for Meaning" into the missteps of even the most contemplative minds - and the gleeful release of their humor. The aggregate is a deeply connected collection of poems for an often fractured world.

Michael Collins, Author of Appearances and Psalmandala