“April Tierney is a curator of mysteries. She’s a teller of terrible and trenchant truths, a maker of magic, a weaver of worlds. You’ll see.”
— Bill Plotkin, author of Soulcraft and Wild Mind
Matter/Mother
In Earth-based cultures, Mothers are held at the center. As life-bearers, they are treated with the same care and respect as Mother Earth. However, in industrialized societies where the Earth is both exploited and neglected, Mothers are, too. Throughout her new collection, April Tierney explores some of the stories and realities of mothering within an anthropocentric, capitalistic, nuclear family paradigm––stories that have often been repressed or dismissed. It is an honest, harrowing, and deeply tender portrayal of early motherhood, one that honors the humanity and complexity of this central role.
Memory Keeper
What is the embodied shape of memory? How is it cared for and set down into the hearts of future generations? Where lives the land of forgetting? Throughout these poems, April Tierney weaves together personal, collective, ancestral, and land-based memory into a single, glistening cloth. She courts the cultural necessity of tending to what might otherwise be lost, by writing her way into the past as a prayer for what is yet to come.
Origin Stories
In April Tierney’s second full length collection of poetry, stories are praised for the faithful and fiercely alive creatures that they are. Her attention to beauty and heartbreak alike is a kind of medicine for our times. As with any life properly lived, nothing is hidden in these pages, and so everything is given away.
Singing to the Bones
A book of poetry that reveres the mysteries of living and dying in a time that is bereft of such visceral beholding. It is part love song, part lament, and part unvarnished longing. Singing to the Bones is a fierce call to kneel again at the hallowed arc of our humanity.