KB Ballentine
KB Ballentine has released a new book of poetry, All The Way Through. A book launch will be held Wednesday, Jan. 22, at 6:30 p.m., at the Soddy Daisy Community Library, 9619 Dayton Pike.
Review for the publication:
There is a luxury in looking back at a journey completed. We begin something because we intend to finish it, and it is the journey that carries more weight than how we start or when we end. The loss or change of relationships, health, and home finds us in denial and “fight mode” where acceptance and appreciation are often hard-won battles.
As the opening poem suggests, this collection is a meditation against forgetting those moments we tend to throw away — lonely, angry, ugly, grief-filled moments we would rather forget. But these are exactly the situations that make us who we are and should be valued even after we make it through the difficult times: especially when we make it all the way through.
Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine says, “KB Ballentine has gathered another outstanding collection of poems, and if you are a new reader to her work something special awaits you in these pages. All the Way Through takes up Robert Frost’s wisdom, ‘the best way out is always through,’ and applies it to the pain and beauty we find everywhere around us…. Though there is much grief to confront, these poems sing their way out of despair and through into hope. In The Lost Heart, one of the most splendid lyrics in the book, the speaker is lifted by birdsong into a state of profound understanding: ‘Each tree branch frosted, / the choir of evening descends / into silence…. / Maybe our loss is the miracle.’ Ballentine offers nature as our bounty, summer as our season of salt, and love as the redemption for the many losses we all must endure. The words of these poems serve as balm and comfort, and they are fine companions for the road ahead.”
Author of Gathering Stones and Fragments of Light published by Celtic Cat Publishing, What Comes of Waiting, The Perfume of Leaving, The Light Tears Loose, and Spirit of Wild published by Blue Light Press, Almost Everything, Almost Nothing published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio, and Edge of the Echo published by Iris Press, KB Ballentine teaches English, theatre, and creative writing at Rhea County High School. An adjunct at Chattanooga State Community College, Ms. Ballentine participates in local writing groups and teaches workshops. She has read her work in a variety of places including the Southern Festival of Books, Women of Appalachia Project, and Salmon Poetry (Ireland).
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