Beauty Still Lives Here

While we can easily find beauty in a silent snowfall or the laughter of children, it is quite another thing to see how beauty can emerge through doing dishes or fighting in the park. Folsom's poetry guides us to pay attention to the presence of beauty in every part of life, no matter how mundane, and in doing resists the sentimentality that often diminishes our experience of beauty's mystery and power. This is a collection to be savored.

-Wesley Vander Lugt, theologian and author of Beauty Is Oxygen: Finding a Faith that Breathes

Beauty Still Lives Here speaks to the core of anyone who has longed for more. The best art takes you on a journey into yourself, and the slow build of metaphors and images in Folsom's collection does exactly that. This collection is a must read.

-Jacinta V. White, publishing editor, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art & Healing and author of Resurrecting the Bones: Born from a Journey through African American Churches & Cemeteries in the Rural South

The domestic and the spiritual hold hands every day. That is the overall message of Kelsi Folsom's startling new book Beauty Still Lives Here. In each poem "a woman peers into the mirror and sees / the work of staying strong" and shows the reader the marvels of mothering, of stumbling through the daily hardships of life, while also finding deep wells of beauty in the daily presence of God. The speaker wonders "Can all the quarters / flying on the wings / of wishes make / an impact at the / bottom of a fountain?" This collection, with its heart open to beauty and hope, answers: Yes.

-Sunni Brown Wilkinson, winner of the 2024 Donald Justice Poetry Prize

Readers will find a restful and soulful companion in Kelsi Folsom and her poems that beckon us to pay attention and consider the ways we inhabit our bodies, our relationships, our places, and beyond. I hope you appreciate her invitation to deeper noticing as much as I do.

-Charlotte Donlon, spiritual director, gatherer, and author of The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other