Prayer in Wind [Paperback]

After a devastating diagnosis of metastatic breast cancer, biologist and poet Eva Saulitis found herself gripped by a long-buried childhood urge to pray. ?Finding little solace in the rote from the fox-hole please Gods arising unbidden in her head, she set herself the task of examining the impulse itself, waking every morning in darkness to write poems, driven on by the questions: What is prayer? What am I praying to? What am I praying for? Who is listening? Each days poem proposed a new and surprising answer as, over two years, she traced the questions back to her origins, her Latvian roots, her peasant grandmother, her war-haunted father, her secret-bearing mother, her childhood Catholicism, her obsession with the natural world. ?Moving from inward to outward, among radically different geographies (coastal Alaska, Latvia, and Hawaii) and spiritual influences (Catholicism, mysticism, Zen Buddhism) as well as forms, these biologically precise poems range widely in their search. ? Unexpectedly, these prayer-poems, forged out of a solitary confrontation with death, take a reader not out of, but deeper into physicalityof the body, the earth, and language itself. ?As Saulitis learns, what is most desired is not transcendence, but for as long as possible, her hands thrust deep in the world.

You showed me / a bog candle. // Nothings been / the same since then. With these simple words, Eva Saulitis shows howtrue life is lived when tiny changes occur. With her attention attuned to inner and outer landscapes, Eva writes poems that are a testament to the precarious splendor of this world.
Arthur Sze
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Eva Saulitis explores the web of connections between nature, science, longing, illness, and the continually shifting boundaries of the mind.?In these poems, we navigate a course through beauty, terror, and mystery in order to reach a place for which the only maps are prayers.
Camille Dungy
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Prayer is often an inward gesturl)