Thread and Nectar by Mobi Warren

Mobi Warren has a magnificent gift for clarity and care. The precise elegance of seeing and saying, the many natural worlds we live within… “One Hundred Thousand, 2003” should be required reading by every “official.” All her poems should be required reading. What may be noticed – and is too often overlooked – shimmers with presence in her poems.

–Naomi Shihab Nye, author of The Tiny Journalist

Within the whisper of her words, Warren captures both the delicate beauty and the heart-wrenching sacredness that cause us to sigh for that which surrounds us and to hold more precious its future and its fragility.  Through poems intimately in touch with our planet, we find here sandhill cranes as “strings of prayer flags/ parents singing children/ across the sky”; sesame seeds clicking open their locks as our legacy of reconciliation; “a last taste of air”;  and, of Oaxacan mole, the “color of your laughter/ tossed into a clay pot.”  Through Mobi Warren’s poetry, we enter a magical and magnificent world, only to discover that it is our world—our very self-same world, which we have previously been too blind to see. Enjoy, absorb, become the stardust of these words, their pulse, and their eternally audible heartbeat.

–Carmen Tafolla, State Poet Laureate of Texas 2015

The poems of Mobi Warren‘s luscious Thread and Nectar carry us directly to intimate relationships with the earth. Human, plant, mammal, bird, insect—we’re all connected in these vivid, wise poems that, while often dealing with loss and tragedy, are always uplifting. “A cocoon is not a cage but a cradle,” Warren writes in “Black Rose,” while grieving the “caging / of children torn from mothers’ arms, / fleeing bullets, hunger, drought. / Trapped like moths in a cemetery.” “Break open the cages,” Warren exclaims. “Make of our World a Cradle.” One of the most moving of all these deeply moving poems is “Early Morning Runs that Became Rescues,” where the poet describes “A young opossum hit by car, four dead babies strewn about her / like spokes of a wheel. I lifted the four survivors, bewildered /and squirming. Folded my shirt into a pouch and tucked them in.” This is a collection of poems that will fold us and tuck us into a safe place, reminding us of Emily Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers.”

–Wendy Barker, author of Gloss

Mobi Warren’s eyes, her heart, her hands all live in Thread and Nectar. We have the gift of her attention, enchanted by the natural world, her voice gentle, insistent, and centered. In poems informed by observation, commitment, and openness to the other, Warren celebrates bees, “whose dance of take is also a dance of give back.” ”Early Morning Runs that Became Rescues” honors each of the creatures she saves with loving vigilance, and concludes with the rescue of a bull snake from garden netting, “Praise the keeled scales that excited/my hands. I cut him free.” Tactile, visual, and giving, Warren’s poems in Thread and Nectar, are infused with the transcendent beauty of a world rich in losses and gifts.

–Jim LaVilla-Havelin, author of West, poems of a place