book of hours

photos / poems / healing.

Jay Heins is an accidental poet. Heins' debut poetry collection, book of hours, gently asks you to consider both small miracles and large tragedies.

Inspired by medieval Christian illuminated manuscripts, Heins adapts a practice of pairing poetry with visual art into a nature-based secular kind of worship. These unconventional prayers are a devotional practice of gratitude juxtaposed with grief, meditations on how death informs life. Consider the lilac bushes taking over the cemetery. The "hills / that unzipped green / only yesterday" set against the doors of the chemo ward. Heins' poetry sketches the beauty and pain when "time removes the guardrails." Always returning to nature for solace, with a focus on the cyclical, book of hours reminds us that "time stops; yet / I am moving / and the river flows."

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how to cook a poem

take one inconsequential event
latch on by imagination
add a sequence of images
imbue with symbolic meaning
marinate in a fugue state
winnow the grain
build up in layers
clarify and distill
draw out the essence
crystallize a gem, a jewel
meta amuse-guele
consomme of new experience
this inconsequential thing
that exists only
for its own pleasure

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