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Stone Girl by Karen Arnold

$17.99

Paper

979-8-89990-774-6

2026

Pre-order Price Guarantee until October 2, 2026

This title will be released on November 27, 2026

 

Stone Girl’s poems spring from decades of Maine interludes, 1978 to 2025.  Hardy coastal landscapes first encountered at Pemaquid Point, the quiet Back Cove in New Harbor, Maine, and later along the deep Kennebec River captured me with tidal swing, echoed sky-light and sometimes stormy energy.  The poems explore a deep connection to natural rhythms, seasonal shifts, and spotlight how Maine’s earth/sea location reminds me always of my place in the cosmos.  People have voyaged from Maine and back over centuries.  My annual trip has become a private pilgrimage to places that feed my soul and senses, renew my life-energy.  Time spent next to Maine’s watery world enhances my writing and relationship to other parts of my life.  I hope these poems pass along a bit of that magic. #seacoast, #seasonalrhythm, #Maine #cosmictides #poetry

 

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Karen Arnold has served as Poet-in-Residence at Montpelier Cultural Arts Center in Laurel, MD; taught at universities in the United States, Sweden and Norway; taught creative and autobiography writing workshops; create and facilitate veterans’ reading and discussion series originated by Maryland Humanities, in libraries and cultural centers.  She has a Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Maryland College Park where she was a Master Teacher and Assistant Director of Freshman English.  Her poems can be found in Trajectory, Connecticut Review, Evening Street Press, Gyroscope, Kerf, Vesper I, For Ukraine from Women of the World, and Farmer-ish.  Originally a Midwesterner, Arnold now lives and works in Maryland near Atlantic shores and beaches which she loves.  Her house is FULL of driftwood, shells, and rocks…..Maryland to Maine!!

 

PRAISE:

 

Stone Girl invites us into a beautiful homage to nature.   Images flow smoothly, powerfully, naturally: from “slightly rustling trees,” to “the ocean floor under a filling moon,” sounds of “the gypsy swell of grasses,” or “waves of wind,” reveal an intricate appreciation of Maine’s land and seascapes. The poems take us on an unforgettable journey through well-loved settings that open our eyes and hearts to the vital impact nature works on us daily.

–Chris Helvey, Editor-in-Chief and publisher of Trajectory Journal. 

 

 

This is a book of tidal attention—patient, weathered, and quietly luminous. In Stone Girl, Karen Arnold gathers a life along the Maine coast into a poetics of listening, where “the river talks to itself” and the speaker, poised above “the sea’s impossible insistence,” begins to blur into rock, tide, and wind. These poems move with the gravity of recurrence—the pull of water, the body’s frailty, the long memory of place—until perception deepens into knowledge. What emerges is a voice at once meditative and unguarded, as alert to erasure as to the small salvations of light. Here is a poet who understands that we are shaped by what we return to, and how, in the presence of time, water, and a dollop of the uncanny, we are steadily, irrevocably changed.
–Jeffrey Levine, founder and Artistic Director of Tupelo Press. His latest book, The Afterparty, will be released by Salmon Press in 2027. 

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