The placenta, the root of your origin, is a miraculous organ that shares and protects your life. It is the conductor that unites you with your mother and serves as the control panel of the womb-ship that sustains you until you are born. It was conceived at the moment of your genesis. Your placenta is genetically identical to you. Though you share some of your parents' genetic identity, unless you have a monozygotic (identical) twin, no one, except your placenta, has ever been so perfectly, exactly you. Sexual reproduction, the act of creating new life, only works because of the placenta. As mammals, we reproduce sexually, so sex is the reddest, hottest tile in the mosaic of our earthly lives, and the placenta is the mandala in the center of this miracle. Historically, our creation stories tell of the Earth Mother birthing the world: her amniotic fluid became the oceans, the placenta became the Tree of Life. This demonstrates how essential the placenta is to our survival and how embedded it is in our psyche. According to Chaos Theory, dynamic systems are sensitive to start up conditions. Human beings are extremely dynamic systems, and our survival hinges on the strength of our individual immune systems. The placenta is the commander-in-chief of the baby's immune system during embryonic development (i.e. condition of start-up). Thus, we must protect our offspring's placentas by being gentle during the transition of birth, to give our children the best possible start and protect the very foundation of their immune systems.
WINNER OF THE 2021 BLUE LIGHT BOOK AWARD.
THIS IS THE BOOK I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR. For years. Emilie Lygren writes essential, elegant poems that help us live our lives and apprehend with deepest gratitude all the gifts surrounding us.
-Naomi Shihab Nye
This voice is a wild spirit disguised as human, schooling in us advantages of feral thought, wilderness virtues, the intuitive aptitude that lives within us. Read these poems and feel it awaken in you, in a realm where bees speak the names of next year's seeds, and the place you shine is inside. Again and again, you will be taken to the peak, to see why you are here.
-Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen Press, 2021)
In What You Were Born For, Emilie Lygren's poems ask us to look closely then shift our perception wider -- from termites flying out of a tree stump to one's own birth, from tools to our inevitable mortality, from sea glass to islands engulfed by sea level rise. As the poems bring us into communion with each other and with the natural world, they also interrogate the constructed world of patriarchal power, perfectionism, and profit. With wonder and play, the poems call us into the wildness of our bodies and call our bodies into the earth to be reborn as seeds. As we reckon with racial violence and global pandemic, these poems offer us a window into our own renewal.
-Tehmina Khan, poet and teacher, City College of San Francisco
Emilie Lygren is a writer, outdoor educator, and facilitator who believes that poetry can change the world. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Geology-Biology from Brown University and has over a decade of experience as a writer and as an outdoor science educator. Emilie has developed dozens of publications and curricula focused on outdoor science education and social-emotional learning through her work at the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. She's also done stints as a kitchen manager, life coach, barista, mentor for teens, and event organizer. Emilie's poems have been published in Thimble Literary Magazine, The English Leadership Quarterly, and Solo Novo, among others. In writing and teaching, Emilie centers awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into deeper relationship with themselves, their communities, and the places they inhabit.
The Yoga Sutra is the great text on Yoga, cognized in ancient India by Maharishi Patanjali. Yoga means union, and the Yoga Sutra describes the experience of unity, the complete settling of the activity of the mind. In 195 short sutras, this text illuminates the teaching of yoga and meditation, and gives a profound understanding of life in transcendence.
She is a founding board member of the nonprofit Ventura County Poetry Project. She and her husband, Conrad (Tim), live in California and Minnesota, near children and grandchildren in both states. She can be contacted through email at marykayrummel.com
n this collection of poems, we show you the city that most tourists miss - dancing the samba at Carnaval in the Mission District, the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn with the perfect angle of light, the timpani of Pacific waves in the Outer Sunset, a cappuccino before work on Minna Alley, Bird & Beckett Bookstore in Glen Park, the dog path at Fort Funston, walking home through the Civic Center in Sunday heat, the clatter inside a flat on Nob Hill by the cable car tracks, ushering at the San Francisco Opera, an inside view of the Summer of Love, the Sing It Yourself Messiah with the Golden Gate Symphony, eight-year-old friends in Bayview careening down their street on a board attached to a roller skate, the Doggie Diner, a night game at Candlestick Park, the Alemany Farmer's Market, the lively street scene at 16th and Valencia, riding the N Judah street car with two cellos to play Mahler at the Herbst Theatre on Bay to Breakers Sunday - and so much more.
Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Hirschman, Alejandro MurguĂa, Barbara Quick, Thomas Centolella, Alison Luterman, Katherine Hastings, George Wallace, Beau Beausoleil, Robert Scotellaro, Daniel J. Langton, Maxine Chernoff, Katharine Harer, Jane Underwood, Kathy Evans and many other celebrated poets.
The seventy-four poems in Lucille Lang Day's Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place take the reader on a journey across continents, seas, and time itself. Charged with a lyricism that is at the same time tough and vulnerable, the poems recreate and preserve images of a beauty that is on the verge of disappearing or has already disappeared. Sometimes it is the beauty of the rain forests of Costa Rica or the birds of the Gal pagos or that of cities like Athens, San Miguel de Allende, or Venice in flood. Sometimes it is a beauty that exists only in a single word such as Oregon, ...from wauregan, an Algonquian word for 'beautiful river.' Yet for all the beauty she evokes, Day does not shy away from difficult topics like global warming, genocide, regret, loss, and death. The result is a remarkable collection of poems that are deeply layered, deeply felt, and deeply moving.
Lucille Lang Day has published six previous full-length poetry collections, including Becoming an Ancestor, and four chapbooks, including Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems. She is also a coeditor of two anthologies, Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, and the author of two children's books, Chain Letter and The Rainbow Zoo, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her books have received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature, the Blue Light Poetry Prize, and two PEN Oakland/ Josephine Miles Literary Awards; her poems, short stories, and essays have received ten Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies. The founder and director of Scarlet Tanager Books, she received her MA in English and MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her BA in biological sciences, MA in zoology, and PhD in science/mathematics education at the University of California, Berkeley.
Winner of the 2018 Blue Light Book Award
Prartho Sereno is author of three previous poetry collections, including Elephant Raga, Call from Paris, and Causing a Stir: The Secret Lives & Loves of Kitchen Utensils (illustrated by the author). She served as Poet Laureate of Marin County, California, 2015--2017, has an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University and was awarded a Radio Disney Super Teacher Award for her 19-years' work as a California Poet in the Schools.
Prartho's poems are informed by many years living in a meditation community in India, but she also credits excursions into other art forms: counseling psychologist, mother of two, vegetarian cook, meditation instructor at Cornell University, book illustrator, and amateur singer-songwriter. Her life's ambition is to be a tour guide of the as-yet-unimagined, a tender of life's creative fires.
She lives a little north of the Golden Gate Bridge with a sweet man who takes her rowing on the bay.