“With its allusions to alchemy and transmutation, Chrysopoeia deepens and expands its accounts of family relationships and narratives of place. It is sensitive, moving, thoughtful, often simultaneously lyrical and complex—a rewarding read on every level.”
Robert Root, Happenstance and Lineage: Reading the Past to Reach the Present
“Each essay is molded from discrete parts, time snipped and restitched, each sense cut from others and reconnected deftly for new meaning. The essays glow golden under our eyes as the writer conjures meaning from life to life. This book is a triumph – for her and for readers. “
Hilda Raz, Letter From a Place I’ve Never Been: Collected and New Poems.
“These essays reject narrative logic with its blind faith in root causes, self-improvement, and better outcomes. They rely instead on association and analogy, braiding disparate experiences and histories with her own, making not-yet conscious wisdom conscious and beautifully articulated. A wise, consoling, luminous book.”
Debra Monroe, It Takes a Worried Woman
Laced with love, art, confession, and connection, the intricate geometries built into this wise and supple book gradually unfold a vast but fragile terrain. Call it home, call it human, this house of poetry "vibrates with possibility"; from folds of an intimate haptic map spring an archipelago of made-places, drawn out by dual seeking, happily singed with hot sauce, and no longer hiding in plain sight. Never reductive, these pliant poems are seductive, instructive, constructive and regenerative. The book’s fourfold frame builds, page on page, line on line, from free and cozy erotic couplets, through shared journeys, joys and pain, toward the wide-awake-world of home-made epiphanies: epic, comic, tragic, and cosmic. Much to mine - reader, dig in!
— Ted Landrum, Midway Radicals & Architects-Poems
READ A POEM: “ELEMENTAL LESSON”
“In a wrenchingly difficult and confusing situation, Christine Stewart-Nuñez has found the wherewithal to make not only meaning but beauty out of unremitting challenges. Her ally and her weapon: poetry. Bluewords Greeningpresents, preserves, and enacts awe, curiosity, tenderness, sensuality, and an endless loving engagement with the world. These poems bear witness; they also lull, celebrate, interpret, and play. This book is an inspiring achievement.” —Rachel Hadas, author of Questions in the Vestibule
READ A POEM (published in Baltimore Review)
READ A POEM (published in The Missouri Review)
READ A POEM (published in Rogue Agent—scroll to bottom)
“In Untrussed, Christine Stewart-Nunez explores the risk inherent in daring to love. These are not poems that can be sailed out into the night. They will return to boomerang the heart.”—Vivian Shipley, author of The Poet
“Untrussed is dedicated to the poet’s loves, and we meet them on every page of this tight, entertaining, and complex collection. You might even think it liberating—making good on its title with every word.”—Lisa Lewis, author of The Body Double
READ A POEM (syndicated in American Life in Poetry)
READ A POEM (published by Cider Press Review)
READ A POEM (published by Portland Review)
Edited by South Dakota poet laureate Christine Stewart-Nunez, this anthology represents a capacious conversation among South Dakota and South Dakota-affiliated poets that speak to our complex stories and experiences. Personal, political, historical, contemporary: this conversation in verse reflects the diverse lives of people who live here or have strong residential ties to the state. Bruce Roseland, long-time president of the South Dakota State Poetry Society, once told Christine that he wanted to see poets “write South Dakota,” and she offers this conversation as one of many that could be fashioned from the rich work happening here in the last decade.
