How to Be a Contemplative

Judith Valente shows us not only how to be a contemplative in our often busy and distracted world, but also how to slow down - and become more human. As she writes in "Lauds: " "I ask the day for its one word, and it gives it to me: / Enough." These sumptuous, grounded poems "of lamentation and light" guide us toward the numinous in every fresh spiritual insight. In Valente's masterful hands, everything comes alive and sings, "overflowing with presence ... even the soap dish, tea cup, and porch steps." The ordinary leads us back to the sacred in a book I already treasure.

-James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Courage & Self-Compassion and editor of How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude & Hope

Judith Valente's collection is a meditative memoir, a wisdom book, a companion for dark nights and darker days - but most of all it is a love letter - to imagination, invisible meanings beneath visible things, and the power of poetry to make them visible to others. Valente proves to be a gentle guide for the gentle reader by inviting us into spaces we don't expect to go: a newborn infant's consciousness, Li Po's wine cup, Thomas Merton's hermitage, the dreams of a drowning child, a geriatric couple's ritual of love in a Spoleto gelateria - and finding in those (extra)ordinary places grace after grace after grace.

-Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, author of Holy Land, Love in the Time of Coronavirus, Dear Dante, and Andalusian Hours: Poems from the Porch of Flannery O'Connor

In this season of anger and betrayal of reason, Judith Valente's poems dare me to hope. With concentration on the senses and her deep comprehension of contemplation - silence, humility, respect for both friend and stranger, restraint in all things but joy - she has taken me on an inward journey to calm. Embracing "sweetness and bitterness alike," these poems are inviting but they are not soft. Could any image be more complex than her invocation of "tiny shrapnels of light?" Could anyone else's travel down the produce aisle yield a more delightful (and astute) observation than hers, that only a God with a sense of humor could have invented the Brussels sprout? This book is a quiet shout of consolation, a call to reason, a balm.

-Rosellen Brown, author of Before and After, Cora Fry's Pillow Book, and The Lake on Fire