James Crews

With the world returning to its old, unsustainable pace (and expecting us to return with it), we all must learn how to make time to slow down, to pause, and to appreciate the beauty around us. In this inspiring collection of poems, award-winning poet and mindfulness educator James Crews models how the smallest moments of deep attention can also be the most joyful and healing. Each poem offers gentle wisdom and comfort, providing life-changing insights that will resonate long after the last page. There should be a room in every house or office building set aside strictly for breathing. No speaking allowed, no phones, clocks, or other devices may be brought inside. Let the walls be empty and white, only potted ferns stirring near windows thrown open to a night-breeze bearing the scents of jasmine and lilac. You can count if you like until your heartbeat slows to its own natural pace, and your mind's as blank as a page in the back of a book. If someone asks for directions, say it’s the room at the end of the hall with nothing else in it but a few plants and all the air you can breathe. AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR: James Crews is an award-winning poet and writer. His work has been awarded the Prairie Schooner Prize and Cowles Prize. He has also been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and The Sun Magazine. UNIVERSAL THEMES: Crews’s poems are accessible and relatable, exploring the universal experiences of rest, reflection, and renewal. ENCOURAGES MINDFULNESS: Breathing Room emphasizes the importance of slowing down and cultivating peace amid life’s chaos. THOUGHTFUL GIFT: A gorgeous illustrated hardcover case, satin ribbon marker, and spot illustrations throughout make this a giftable collector’s item that will be treasured for decades.

This luminous and open-hearted anthology of poems from the LGBTQIA+ community proves that there is nothing more universal than love. Edited by James Crews with his husband, Brad Peacock, and illustrated by Lisa Congdon, these compassionate poems of connection and affirmation are a celebration of all kinds of love-romantic, family, friendship, self-love, and love for nature. The poems are gathered from a diverse group of contemporary writers, both part of and allied with the LGBTQIA+ community, with a special focus on queer, nonbinary, and transgender poets. Contributors include Andrea Gibson, Ellen Bass, Nikita Gill, Mark Doty, Audre Lorde, Richard Blanco, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Danez Smith, Joy Ladin, Carl Phillips, Li-Young Lee, and many others. Brief essays called "Stories of Becoming" act as touchstones throughout the book, telling the inspiring and touching stories of LGBTQIA+ people whose experiences may bring hope to others.

James Crews's three anthologies of contemporary poems celebrating hope, wonder, kindness, and connection packaged in a beautiful gift box set with the addition of four illustrated poem cards suitable for framing. These are the poems our world needs now. Together, the three books include over 300 poems by a diverse selection of leading and emerging contemporary poets, including Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Jane Hirshfield, Tracy K. Smith, Julia Alvarez, Ellen Bass, Danusha Laméris, Li-Young Lee, Naomi Shihab Nye, Joy Harjo, Joseph Bruchac, Nikita Gill, Linda Hogan, Mark Nepo, Alberto Ríos, and others. Special bonus feature: four frameable prints of poems by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Kimberly Blaeser, Paula Gordon Lepp, and a new poem by James Crews.

James Crews, editor of two best-selling poetry anthologies, How to Love the World and The Path to Kindness, presents an all-new collection of highly accessible poems on the theme of celebrating moments of wonder and peace in everyday life. As Crews writes in the introduction: "[A] deep love for the world is present in every one of the poems gathered in this book. Wonder calls us back to the curiosity we are each born with, and it makes us want to move closer to what sparks our attention. Wonder opens our senses and helps us stay in touch with a humbling sense of our own human smallness in the face of unexpected beauty and the delicious mysteries of life on this planet." The anthology features a foreword by Nikita Gill and a carefully curated selection of poems from a diverse range of authors, including Native American poets Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Kimberly Blaeser, and Joseph Bruchac, and BIPOC writers Ross Gay, Julia Alvarez, and Toi Derricotte. Crews features new poems from popular writers such as Natalie Goldberg, Mark Nepo, Ted Kooser, Naomi Shihab Nye, Jane Hirshfield, and Jacqueline Suskin, along with selections from emerging poets. Readers are guided in exploring the meaning and essence of the poems through a series of reflective pauses scattered through the pages and reading group questions in the back. This anthology offers the perfect intersection for the growing number of readers interested in mindful living and bringing poetry into their everyday lives.

Following the success and momentum of his anthology How to Love the World (93,000 copies in print), James Crews's new collection, The Path to Kindness, offers more than 100 deeply felt and relatable poems from a diverse range of voices including well-known writers Julia Alvarez, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alberto Ríos, Ross Gay, and Ada Limón, as well as new and emerging voices. Featured Black poets include January Gill O’Neil, Tracy K. Smith, and Cornelius Eady. Native American poets include Kimberly Blaeser, Joy Harjo (current U. S. Poet Laureate), and Linda Hogan. The collection also features international voices, including Canadian poets Lorna Crozier and Susan Musgrave. Presented in the same perfect-in-the-hand format as How to Love the World, the collection includes prompts for journaling and exploration of selected poems, a book group guide, bios of all the contributing poets, and stunning cover art by award-winning artist Dinara Mirtalipova. A foreword by Danusha Laméris, along with her popular poem "Small Kindnesses," is also included.

An Indie Poetry Bestseller! What the world needs now – featuring poems from inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith and more. More and more people are turning to poetry as an antidote to divisiveness, negativity, anxiety, and the frenetic pace of life. How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope offers readers uplifting, deeply felt, and relatable poems by well-known poets from all walks of life and all parts of the US, including inaugural poet Amanda Gorman, Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, and others. The work of these poets captures the beauty, pleasure, and connection readers hunger for. How to Love the World, which contains new works by Ted Kooser, Mark Nepo, and Jane Hirshfield, invites readers to use poetry as part of their daily gratitude practice to uncover the simple gifts of abundance and joy to be found everywhere. With pauses for stillness and invitations for writing and reflection throughout, as well as reading group questions and topics for discussion in the back, this book can be used to facilitate discussion in a classroom or in any group setting.

The summer of 2020 has shown us how much we all depend on one another. Whatever else they do, pandemics show us we are not alone. Covid-19 is proof that, yes, there is such a thing as society; the disease has spread precisely because we aren’t autonomous individuals disconnected from each other, but rather all belong to one great body of humanity. The pain inflicted by the pandemic is far from equally distributed. Yet it reveals ever more clearly how much we all depend on one another, and how urgently necessary it is for us to bear one another’s burdens. It’s a good time, then, to talk about solidarity. The more so because it’s a theme that’s also raised by this year’s other major development, the international protests for racial justice following George Floyd’s death. The protests, too, raised the question of solidarity in guilt, even guilt across generations. By taking up our common guilt with all humanity, we come into solidarity with the one who bears it and redeems it all. In Christ, sins are forgiven, guilt abolished, and a new way of living together becomes possible. This solidarity in forgiveness gives rise to a life of love. This issue of Plough explores what solidarity means, and what it looks like to live it out today, whether in Uganda, Bolivia, or South Korea, in an urban church, a Bruderhof, or a convent.

In Every Waking Moment, James Crews plumbs his past and family life for insights, yet always returns to the moment at hand, approaching the world with mindfulness, openness, and clarity. He finds the miraculous in a shaft of sunlight while waiting for the subway, in an eagle glimpsed from a train along the Hudson, or in the fields of sweet corn surrounding his house. Crews reminds us over and over in this meditative new collection: "You must / put yourself in the path of joy / to find it."

Bluebird is a wide-ranging and open-hearted chronicle of the poet's life on an organic farm with his husband in rural Vermont. Written with clarity and attention to the moments that make life memorable, Crews urges us in his newest collection "To live unbound by time/and mind—to grow, speak, touch and taste/at a pace that feels more real."

For any of us, what stays? For the arsonist's wife who has not yet left? The devout saint trudging another mile in his nail-shoes? The lost couple in their dying moments in a Nebraska blizzard? The old woman who refuses to leave her home in Chernobyl? With an unflinching eye, James Crews gives us the forbidden love, forbidden unions, and secret lives that, whatever the loss, the attrition, the cost, we must acknowledge, must hold, must keep. And here, in Crews's finely wrought, deeply felt poems, is their testimony.