womb song
“Now you are gone and for a while my womb lost its voice and forgot how to sing. / What is a song but a daughter’s love transcending time and space? / I am learning to listen.”
When her beloved dog Ealga dies, Esther Vincent Xueming finds her home, which had been filled with the songs and sounds of Ealga’s life, abruptly silent. womb song chronicles Esther’s journey through grief as she wanders from landscape to landscape, from a temple in Bangkok to her subconscious, from the Kinabatangan River to the uncharted space of her dreams. All the while, the sea within her tosses. As Esther searches for healing, she finds herself asking, what does it mean to mother—a dog, a child, another non-human life—and be mothered?
A new nature poetry collection that revolves around the relationship between humans and non-humans. Great for readers interested in spirituality and self-discovery as well as readers who are new to poetry.
Available in paperback and e-book format. Paperback + E-book bundle available below: Get the e-book at 50% off with each purchase of a paperback.
womb song
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E-book
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Reviews
In womb song, an elegy for non-human kin opens up the heart in wild tenderness. Esther Vincent Xueming invites us into delicate, vulnerable interiorities of musical paean to fauna and flora - elephant to heron, canine to bee, fern to bamboo - and lush dreamscapes. Here, grieving is a transformative process, revealing new worlds through song-meditations on the gentle creatures around us. ‘earth womb / mother womb / light womb’, a complex maternal love is wrestled with throughout these poems. In her menagerie of dreams and dream-creatures, grief and kinship bring us to ’the water over a jellyfish sea, our laughter glowing and luminescent in the daylight thrill’. The poet teaches us of emotional dimension: ‘there can be no grief in the presence of infinite love.’ — Khairani Barokka, author of amuk
Esther Vincent Xueming, an acclaimed ecopoet, focuses her attention on multispecies relations and kinships. Through dreams and songs, prose and lyric, she crafts a profound meditation on mothering, loss, grieving, and letting go. This book is, indeed, a “womb song to the world.” May it echo across our wounded planet. — Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold
womb song is an incredible, profound and transformative collection of poetry. Esther Vincent Xueming takes the reader on a surreal journey of interconnectedness between the realms of life and afterlife, joy and grief, dream and reality, consciousness and subconsciousness and the seemingly invisible but ever present living organisms that are affected by each step we take on this earth. Deeply felt is our interbeing and humanness merging with plant, animal, water relatives. Vincent writes, “Teach me, fern, to shed my brown leaves and grow again with little resistance,” and “In another dream, small white flowers bloom from my fingers and I reach out to offer them to a hummingbird.” Like the mother orca calling to her lost baby, Esther Vincent Xueming’s womb song calls us back home with her song. Perhaps, our heart is indeed “just a lotus waiting to bloom.” To experience Xueming’s lucid dream world is to breathe underwater. — Teresa Mei Chuc, author of Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012), Keeper of the Winds (FootHillis Publishing, 2014) and Invisible Light (Many Voices Press, 2018)
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womb song
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Attunement
Is life hustling you out of tune? As the week roars by, we invite you to a slice of attunement penned lovingly by our authors, friends, and yours truly. Freshly delivered weekly with care. Intimacy guaranteed. Read selected letters below.
Magical, luminous things
Feb 19, 2022
I have flown across an ocean this week. This still sounds surreal to say.
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No negotiation for blood debt
Feb 14, 2022
The Burmese language resistance poetry is deeply embedded in the country’s colonial past. When mo...
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Burning holes in the darkness
Feb 7, 2022
Poets killed in broad daylight, writers tortured and maimed. I wonder if their ghosts watch on fr...
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