As Wind Rounds Sandstone, As Ice Sections Schist by H. L. Hix

“In H. L. Hix’s stunning new collection, we find ourselves deeply grounded in heartbreaking, inspiring, cautionary narratives, individuated lives that open toward a recognition and embodiment of the forms of connectivity that give enduring significance and presence. The true story, our defiant friend in an age of increasing unreliability, provides leverage for an equally undeniable sense of debt, awe, and contingency, moments that call upon imaginative life to bear testament to both our mutual reliance and the will to transform dread, powerlessness, and alienation. What follows is a visionary exploration (from reformers to mystics) of the untenable boundaries of selfhood, while also acknowledging the facts of sectioning (division and aggression) embedded in and perpetuated by cultural memory. However benign or brutal the forces, historical or divine, they become a part of us—elemental, as wind and ice, not only in mollifying and sharpening the human spirit, but so too in beckoning us toward the metaphysics of an unheard exchange, conversations across a difference, whose voices, ‘like the dolphins’,’ call to mind the stuff of song. A deeply wise and beautiful book.” —Bruce Bond

“Simone Weil described what's required in genuinely seeing the world and writing about it as an act of translating ‘a text that is not written down.’ As Wind Rounds Sandstone, As Ice Sections Schist boldly enacts that searching quality of attention. H. L. Hix's poems have a stark, sonic, philosophical beauty. In the section Lives of the Peacemakers, Hix remembers lives marked by injustice, and every poem envisions a luminous counter to the individual grief or wound. In Visions of the Mystics, the poems perform astounding and intimate re-readings of textual fragments from the mystical tradition. ‘A pencil that within its hard lead holds // everything that can be written about / everything that can't be written about.’ Across time and space, the two parts of this book speak to one another in complex ways that resonate endlessly. The cumulative effect is stunning and profound.” —René Steinke