Julie Sumner
Winner of the inaugural Wildhouse Poetry Chapbook Contest, 2023
Debut book, Meridian, releasing November 2023
Julie’s Latest
Meridian
Winner of the 2023 Wildhouse Poetry Chapbook Contest.
RELEASING NOVEMBER 2023
Meridian is a collection of poems that reflects the poet’s deep and abiding love affair with the natural world.
The poems draw on the alchemy that binds the visible and the invisible, capturing moments with people, places, and things that cannot be reduced and therefore diminished. Written over a span of years, the poems reflect the author’s ongoing fascination with things that can be perceived but neither measured nor explained in surface conceptions.
The two pieces that bookend this collection feature a mysterious hum, and that thread traces its way through the collection as a whole: the early poems begin with abstract ideas about time and binary thinking, subsequently widening the frame to explore the poet’s expansive sense of humankind and her engagement with nature. With an architect’s eye, she shapes these poems to meet the varied contexts from which they arose, opening to us a vision of creation that seeks to engage readers with a sense of wonder and invite them into the spacious embrace of gratitude.
Read title poem "Meridian” via Fathom Magazine.
“These pages conjure and hold in hand, eyes, and ear the ranges of our human lives: our shapes, fates, forms, choices, pausings, ponderings; our borrowed feathers, our mysteries, our resilience.”
ABOUT JULIE
Julie Sumner has been featured in Delta Poetry Review, The Intima, Relief Journal, Wondrous Real, Catalpa Magazine, The Cresset, The Englewood Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Her chapbook, Meridian, was chosen by poet Jane Hirshfield as the winner of the 2023 con/verge/nces Prize from Wildhouse Publishing. She has an MFA in poetry from Seattle-Pacific University.
From julie’s reading:
“We do not grieve only with indistinguishable cries or howls (though sometimes that is the case), but with words. Words, despite what some postmodern theorists suggest, do have meaning. The word mean actually means “middle ground.”...Words are our bridge to heaven, to paradise, to the otherworldly, and we need them. ”