Endorsements

“In her haunting and lyrical new poetry collection, Running Toward Water, Jenna Wysong Filbrun deftly maps the raw terrain of grief, chronic illness, and climate change. Filbrun carries us with her as she goes through the fires of ordinary life and becomes transformed by the one constant she can count on—the power and hope offered in the natural world. These poems are beautifully bound by threads of a spiritual journey. In the end, the poet’s well-crafted, musical, and often surprising turns-of-phrase combine to invite us to understand that our humanity cannot be separated from its home and that often the solace we are looking for is right in front of us.”
—Ellis Elliott, author of Break in the Field, a poetry collection, and A Witch Awakens: A Fire Circle Mystery

“Jenna Wysong Filbrun’s Running Toward Water is a stunningly beautiful collection. Drawing intensely on the wide sweep and intricate details of the natural world, it is also personal, lyrical, profoundly human. Filbrun explores memory and the cycles of time, the beauty and fragility of life, and our inevitable encounters with love, pain, and loss. Throughout, her poetry is shot through with slender rays of hope and faith, rays that indicate a still greater light underpinning all our beliefs and all our art. Individual poems show us how to ‘breathe and decipher’ (‘Air Quality Warning’) life’s ordinary as well as its ultimate mysteries, encourage us to ‘hallow the bones as they hollow’ (‘My Loves, the Earth, My Bones’), and teach us how, in simply and attentively being, we can attain a state of prayer.”
—Sarah Law, editor of Amethyst Review, author of This Transfigured Chapel of the Threads

“Jenna Wysong Filbrun’s poems speak to us from a voice that notices every detail, questions its surroundings, and ultimately, calls out to be heard. In the poem ‘On Not Becoming Bitter,’ she writes, ‘What you think you see is only the shadow / of something more.’ In this collection, Filbrun pursues the ‘something more’ that lies beyond the shadows, and she offers her findings with extraordinary care. ‘I want to soften like a seed / in the earth, twine like a root / in the ground, reach like a vine,’ she writes in ‘Instruction on Lasting.’ These poems come from the earth, sprout up, and climb toward the light.”
—Aaron Lelito, editor-in-chief of Wild Roof Journal

“Jenna Wysong Filbrun is one of those special poets who has found that secret nexus of wilderness and sacredness. Like Mary Oliver, she urges us to look around, dig our fingers into loam, and follow wild water to the undomesticated revelation that we may already be in Paradise, such as when she writes, ‘I believe / in a place / I can’t quite / get to / somewhere / I already / am.’ And when I read her poetry, I know it to be true.”
—Nicholas Trandahl, award-winning poet, author of Purgatory and Cabin Sketches