Praise for Spirit of Wild:

“What did you want to be, when you thought you could / be anything?” asks poet KB Ballentine. The poems in this luminous collection emerge as beacons, offering guidance in brief moments bound in rich imagery. Some poems pose other questions: “How do I lose / part of myself / and stay whole?” Some offer gentle assurances: “To sing in the dark / is to know there is light.” All attest to the resilience and persistence of the spirit, like “a rain of starlings in winter’s longest night— . . . rising, always rising.” Ballentine’s unmistakable voice and skill with language shine throughout, balancing the natural world with the natural interiors of the human heart. What is the “spirit of wild” if not that pairing, that step into our truest selves as “the restless wind whispers courage.” Find your courage in these poems.

—Sandy Coomer, author of The Broken Places

As KB Ballentine delves without fear from windowed rooms into a wilderness of forest and ocean, it soon becomes clear that even the darkness in her collection Spirit of Wild is one that teems with life, wing, and song. In a place where “horses feed in the gloaming” and hope expresses itself with the music of chimes, time is marked only by the changing of seasons, the different names of the moon, and the pangs of the poet’s grief. The spirits here are imbued with an astonishing empathy toward each other, a testament to the poet’s own empathy as she opens herself to a wilderness which teaches her how to lose someone she loves. There are dissonances and dangers here, of course, but an untamed beauty transcends them. These well-crafted and well-arranged poems teach us to “cast off the rooms where we’ve boxed ourselves tight” and “step into the den of the forest’s deep heart.” Ballentine shows us that there is “a shelter for the sacred in each of us.” Spirit of Wild is a balm, and I didn’t know how much I needed it.

—Chera Hammons, author of Maps of Injury

Spirit of Wild confirms that “each day waits with sudden mysteries, / offerings, / like dreams half-remembered / from the night.” In lyrical, precise language that throbs and pulses with the rhythms of the natural world, Ballentine celebrates the spirit of all manner of life’s organic wonders, from the fox and wren to the bee and seahorse, to lavender fog and “stones cloaked in mossy silence.” Here, on a journey through changing seasons, under every phase of the moon, in real-time, dreamworld, and memory, the poet illuminates – through motifs of light that linger, dissolve, glint, and leap – those wild spaces where we can safely mourn our absences or linger in the throes of desire. Emerging as we are from the pandemic, I can’t think of a better time for this exuberant collection to come to light, nor a better time to heed Ballentine’s call to “cast off the rooms where we’ve boxed ourselves tight / step into the den of the forest’s deep heart.”

–– Hayley Mitchell Haugen, Sheila-Na-Gig Editions