Traveling Without A Map by Margaret J. Hoehn

I picked up a poetry chapbook at a local indie book-store by Anabiosis Press and felt I should share it with you. It is titled Traveling Without A Map by Margaret J. Hoehn and it is delightful. I was hoping to find a way to contact her but ran out of time. She is from Sacramento, California and while this chapbook was the winner of the 2004 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest she has won other prizes before and since then. If you are able to find any work by her, please take a look and see for yourself how clean and refreshing her poems are, particularly in this chapbook if you happen to come across it. I also bet you can ask Anabiosis Press if they have any more copies or could produce a copy for you. Chapbooks are typically very inexpensive.
Here is one of her refreshing poems:

Georgia O’Keefe Writes Her Friends:
“I Won’t Return To New York”

At Ghost Ranch,
I chip turquoise from sky,
gather bits of summer
into my pockets,
watch the skull of a horse
rise, luminous and white:
morning star above the ridges,
lit bone spilling
back to the land,
memory of scrub
and stone,
of a colt that grazed
wild with its herd.
Here, I savor the lavish
Desire of light,
walk unfettered
toward four horizons,
forget how to sleep,
stack longing
in the shade of a cliff.
Between angular hours,
I study the syntax
of wind, of cliffs,
of my lover’s
blue veins.
Here, I am a grain
of warm sand, I am
the desert’s bright door,
shaped
like a slender green leaf.

This poem is the very first poem in Margaret Hoehn’s chapbook and I was hooked right then and there to read the rest of them. Excellent arrangement of poems,too, all of them connected to each other so the book flows very well.
Thanks for reading Margaret J. Hoehn’s work, please stop by tomorrow for another great poetry web-site!