Brief Immensity – (WINNER 2016 OPEN Contest) by Jeanine Stevens

With its acute sense of time and space, Brief Immensity is like walking through an expertly curated exhibit. Jeanine Stevens’ perceptions meld a scientist’s accuracy with an artist’s playfulness and a teacher’s generosity. Whether on rabbit feet traveling diagonally across the page, on snowshoes at Lake Tahoe or in Florsheims, she brings the reader along on a journey through past and present, across tides high and low, accompanied by sounds of flutes and falling snow. Stevens excites in us a curiosity to meet the world anew, to stay up late and “gaze at the mystical/ reconnaissance much as the lone deer rises/ in a fern meadow and passes, / nose to the horizon…/

–Alexa Mergen, poet and yoga teacher

In Brief Immensity, “the mind dreams on walls,” there’s “light that halts and waits for other things to begin,” and we hear “the sea wall whisper;” Stevens’ poetic journey, honestly rendered, pulls at the edges where common meets the mystic.

–Tim McLafferty, Editor of Forge, and musician