Order Instructions for Waking
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Paperback: 70 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (Jan. 2026)
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9781639808465
Praise for Instructions for Waking
While these poems provide, as Jennifer Hartenburg’s title suggests, Instructions for Waking, her reader would take care to be fully awake to uncommon linguistic magic from the first word. Measure for measure—and what various and engaging measures these are!—she offers a most astonishingly lush and learnéd gathering of poems in this new collection. I am reminded of Bishop’s famous “eye,” of Moore’s estimable syllabic accomplishment, and the reminiscence simply enhances the delight I take from these canny, linguistically chewy observations. Her wit will have you grinning wide; her wisdom surely will crack your heart a bit. I’m also reminded of the question Jesus posed to the man languishing at the pool: Do you want to be healed? In this collection, Hartenburg asks: Do you want to be awakened?
—Scott Cairns, Author of Correspondence with My Greeks, etc.
I’ve been looking forward to this collection for years. These poems are dense and lush with the life of the world, with birds and plants and humans fumbling through worship, loss, and lovemaking. Hartenburg is a poet of affirmation, not just of images, but also of sounds—clinquant, melisma, rachis. Her words are invitations to try out new sounds in your own mouth, whether English or Greek or Latin or the withering ecstasy of pronouncing your own place within the world. Here are poems with which to rest, to wake, and—if you are willing—take wing.
—Timothy E. G. Bartel, Author of A Crown for Abba Moses: New and Selected Poems
In Jennifer Hartenburg’s breathtaking debut collection, we are guided by an always inquisitive mind. Her starting points may be literary—Sylvia Plath’s black bull and Kierkegard’s canary, sacred art, or a Sky & Telescope livestream. Always, there is curiosity, luminous language, and rapt attention. Her eye is unflinching, as when she details the decay of a dead grackle, and its transmutation, into “a blessing—a gift of dust.” Add to that her dexterity with poetic forms. In this poet’s hands, the mundane becomes mystic.
—Kathleen O’Toole, Author of This Far, past Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, MD
Jen Hartenburg’s Instructions for Waking is an allusive and luminous collection that builds bridges between art and nature. These poems are tender, searching, and intellectually alert—they invite the reader to contemplate questions of philosophy, love, fertility, and the divine. With language capable of both soothing and surprising, Hartenburg fearlessly lays bare the mystic connection that pulses between the inner life and the living world.
—Bethany Getz, Author published in Windhover, the Saint Katherine Review, and the Imaginative Conservative.
Instructions for Waking explores the fullness of language and experience, and in echoes equal parts Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mary Oliver, beautifully marries the two. Through a stunning array of evocative imagery, illuminating puns, philosophical nods, and pregnant allusions, Hartenburg reminds us of the power of words, bringing to bear both their earthy and ethereal aspects on our inner and outer realities. In so doing, this collection effects a satisfying reproachment between the natural and the personal, the objective and subjective, the mythological and the intimate. One can never quite reach the depths of these surprisingly accessible poems, which is just as well. They demand and deserve revisiting, with each encounter introducing us anew to ourselves and our world. Time with them is time well-spent.
—Marybeth Baggett, Co-author of Telling Tales
As its title suggests, the poems in Instructions for Waking both teach and delight, inviting the reader to admire rachis and down, mud and rivulet, squelch and sparkle. Filled with coarse crumbs of forgiving and living earth, here is sustenance for lovers of words and of nature. Hartenburg’s attention to sound, syllable, and form demonstrates her range as a poet, and the order and design within these poems, deserving of slow enjoyment, is matched with adventure: There is plenty to discover in her lexical layers and turns, and vistas varying from Mt. Athos to Pascagoula. Often spiritual and maternal in their watchfulness, here are poems about birth and death, the sacred in the soil and wind. These poems will stir and reward the student of word, image, and thought.
—Emily E. Stelzer, Author of Gluttony and Gratitude: Milton’s Philosophy of Eating
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