Conversation Pieces

Vol. 89 — Numinous Stones

by Holly Lyn Walrath

$12 $10.00 (paperback)
$5.95 (e-book)	EPUB	MOBI (unavailable)

Read a sample from the book.

From Elgin Award winning author Holly Lyn Walrath, a haunting collection of poetry about grief and the sacred that digs deep beyond a fairytale world into the grave. Told in the circular pantoum form, Numinous Stones is a poetic graveyard littered with horror—from sentient scarecrows to silent skeletons to scorched sacred spaces. As each line repeats, new meaning gleams like bones unearthed in a shattered realm of monsters, dark forests, and dusty ghosts.

“Walrath poetically constructs tombstones (what is poetry if not construction?) imbued with a sacred, powerful, and majestic presence that both attracts and terrifies. They are sacred tombstones that serve the poet, and we will see this in the reading of her texts to celebrate, mourn, cry out, and, finally, accept her father’s death…. The collected poems constitute a journey, a slow path that we could also define as a slow coming to consciousness. A becoming aware of a pain to be understood and experienced to be, finally, accepted.”
 —From the original Introduction by Alex Tonelli in Numinose Lapidi

Reviews

  Numinous Stones is a collection of speculative pantoums, a form derived from the Malay verse pantun berkait, which is a form of interwoven verses of alternating lines. This is a difficult form to accomplish, as the repeated lines need to seem fresh each time the reader encounters them, but also echo back to the previous stanza. The tightly entwined stanzas, when executed well, create a rhythmic and incantatory experience for the audience, hypnotizing them in a sonic spell.
   Readers, if you read Numinous Stones, be prepared to be hypnotized.  (Read the whole review)
  —Cemetery Dance Online, Joshua Cage, April 2023

ISBN: 978-1-61976-244-2 (13 digit)
Publication Date: Jul 2023
paperback 98 pages