Blessing the Waters by Angela Griner

Griner is a trusted guide, inviting you to go only where she has dared to journey. The poetry you hold in your hands will take you to the shadows of your heart and give you language for what you find there. Let the power and passion of these words heal and transform you.

–Phileena Heuertz, author of Pilgrimage of a Soul (InterVarsity Press 2010 and 2014) and Mindful Silence (InterVarsity Press 2018).

“Out of the chasm of chaos/ out of the stifling heat,” grace arrives like “a slow breeze up through your fingers and hair.” Read these poems with the deep understanding that we all experience “vigor and decay” and at times our lives can be a search for answers and a quest for release from grieving. These are the emotions and thoughts Angela Griner expresses in her poems. They are an incantation in search of wholeness. For Ms. Griner, mountains and oceans can be birthed from acceptance, hope and a “song of reconciliation.”

–Rosalind Brenner, artist and poet, author of Every Glittering Chimera (Blue Light Press 2019), All That’s Left (Art House Press 2011), and Omega’s Garden (Finishing Line Press 2012)

In Blessing the Waters Angela Griner wrestles with grief and longing painted in brush strokes of nature, pulsing with blood, and gilded with the divine. She lays bare her desire to know and be known “by the old elm and oak trees/by the river or the stream,” then calls us into the unseen hope of healing as she pleads, “Sing my name/Sound it out…unearth, unbend, unbreak, and mend.” The poems in this collection are raw and reflective and meant to be savored, leaving the reader with a desire to sing along with the poet, “I want to know the path/and the path to know me.”

–Stacy Barton, author of Like Summer Grass (Finishing Line Press 2014)