Connie Hills’s poems appear in journals such as Porter Gulch Review, Red Rock Review, Red Wheelbarrow Literary Magazine, Bark, San Diego Poetry Annual, Catamaran, and the anthology, Look Away Now, 2025. She is a pushcart nominee. This is her first poetry collection.
PRAISE:
The title of this volume alludes to the poet’s deep connection with the natural world, for it is during the wet season that rain drenches the earth creating the moist darkness that supports sprouting, ripening and finally, abundance. Connie’s work — a collection of personal vignettes of place and time, legacy, the power of relationships, and mind’s own wanderings — is the harvest of such a wet season (maybe many). Each poem is a personal scene, an intimate sharing of stillness or energy, and which is always tactile, vivid, and able to draw the reader into moments of nostalgia, revelation, whimsey, sensuality, and empathy for our universal tough, tender, and human experiences. A sparse, single line declaring the ordinary, or the wisdom-eye word that evokes transcendence give the poems a zen-like sensibility which is best savored when only the essential is one’s desired companion, and during a quiet time, perhaps while sequestering during…the wet season.
–Anne Teich, PhD, Editor, Blooming in the Desert, Favorite Teachings of the Wildflower Monk Taungpulu Sayadaw. Practitioner of the Buddhist path since 1975. Student of Dhammaratana Rina Sircar. Founding board member of Taungpulu Kaba-Aye Monastery, Boulder Creek, California. Mindfulness-insight meditation teacher at Thekchen Choling Syracuse.
These poems bear the traces of wide-flung experience, from a California childhood to the jungles of South India, from Buddhist shrine to the Jungian depths: elegy, portrait, narrative vignette. I admire their straightforward free-verse lines and the wise, clear voice behind them.
–Joseph Millar, Author of Shine
The title of this stunning collection of poems, Wet Season, with its sly double-entendre, hinting at sex and monsoons, prepares us for the world according to Connie Hills. We are ushered into a sensuous, sacred, magical realm—where her “first crush…lit up geometry class like moonlight over the sea,” where a Jamaican garbageman is a beautiful God, where her mother’s skin–at the end of her life–is a “starry sky of moles,” where the “Wet Season” splashes up “a festival of worms,” and a tiger sighting in India is a glimpse of the holy. Hills uses all her senses to create her luminous verse. She has an eye for the perfect detail. Packing a sandwich calls up her Norwegian ancestors. Trying on a “Persian-lime coat’ in a Paris boutique is a near orgasmic experience. We find ourselves fully engaged in her world, feeling her joys, her sorrows, calmed by her spiritual practice. If you love life, and its many manifestations, you’ll love “Wet Season.”
–Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, author of Her Face in the Fire, and The Faust Woman Poems
“Connie Hills is a poet of devotions: to family, music, the body, dogs, beloveds, and the deeper questions. We are lucky to read these poems and have their fragrance, like the gardenia perfume she describes, infuse our, “skin, bones, marrow.”
–Danusha Laméris (author of Bonfire Opera, and Blade by Blade)
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