Author Description

From the ocean to the forest to the mountains to the desert, the poems in Joseph L. Bensinger's Journeys through the Tapestry search every mossy corner of the natural world for the rippling wellspring of our human natures. In this poetic pilgrimage, the quest for revelation is answered with the mysteries of salt and sand, of cloud and snow. This collection constructs a new theology of origins and endings that blends myth, religion, and a mystical environmentalism. Here, rhyme and meter become ritual and prayer. The night sky becomes an altar, where we are just "a speck of light. / A speck of near nothingness / in the vast, dark vastness." It's this distilled sense of wonder that forms the dewy threads of the web connecting each glistening thing under the sun-and beyond it. In this re-envisioned second edition of Journeys through the Tapestry, poet Joseph L. Bensinger invokes the panoramic majesty of our beloved Earth and reveals the divinity in every drop of water, every molecule of breath.