“It was always this way, when you walked the paths slowly, gathered by the muddy rivers to wash, looked into each others’ eyes, spoke without words…” have you ever questioned what the purpose of life was? What happens after death? And if it all even matters? Across A Field of Stars by Elise Stuart takes you on a journey through nature and experience, exploring the beginning, middle, and end of this thing called life.

Reading this collection feels like being taken on a long walk, at first through the open fields, then into the shadowed places we try not to look at, and finally back out into the light. Poems keep circling nature, not as scenery but as a kind of mentor. Trees, rivers, seasons as if they’re always speaking, if we slow down enough to listen. The poet suggests that everything is poetry, that the world is constantly whispering lines at us, and we’re just clumsy translators, trying to catch them before they disappear.

The heart of the collection, though, lies in its confrontation with loss. The poems dwell on parents who inevitably leave, the baggage they pass on, and the work children must do to rewrite their own lives. That honesty is hard-hitting: grief, anger, and even inherited trauma are laid bare on the page. Yet it doesn’t feel despairing. Instead, the poems recognize that change is possible, even necessary, and that turning away from the past is sometimes the only way to move forward. The poet ties personal grief to historical wounds like the Bath Riots in El Paso and The Holocaust, reminding us these are not just footnotes in history but echoes that still shake through the present. And yet, even in the middle of anger, there’s a thread of hope: the belief that change is possible, that love doesn’t just survive hatred but outlasts it.

The final stretch of the collection feels like standing at the edge of something—death, yes, but also renewal. There’s a dance with death happening in these lines, not as morbid fixation but as a way of learning gratitude for life while we still have it. There’s a tenderness in how death is framed, not as an abrupt stop but as a return, a rejoining with nature and whatever waits beyond. I kept thinking about the imagery of seasons, how a tree doesn’t resist losing its leaves, it lets them go, because it knows spring will return. That idea of mother nature’s promise feels like the soft landing the book has been preparing us for all along.

What I loved most is how the collection doesn’t let you stay in one place for long. It stretches your gaze wide, pulls you close to the wound, and then asks you to imagine transformation. By the end, I felt both unsettled and steadied reminded that grief, history, and even death are all part of a larger rhythm. This book doesn’t just give you poems; it gives you a way to see, a way to walk through the world a little differently.

review written by our Fall 2025 Grandma Moses Press intern: Alexis Montoya

Elise Stuart has lived in Silver City for nineteen years. Living in the Midwest, then the Northwest, she was taken by surprise at the immensity of the New Mexico sky, the wide blue, the clouds that told her stories, the mountains, the Gila River, the wildflowers that live with so little rain.

She became the poet laureate of Grant County in 2014. Her vision was of youth bringing their poetry into the world, so she began offering poetry workshops. She gave nearly 100 workshops at schools in the area for three years. The students made “poem flags” by writing and illustrating one of their original poems. These were displayed in libraries, schools, coffee shops, an assisted living center and at WNMU’s art gallery for the Southwest Word Fiesta.

In 2017, her first book of poetry, Another Door Calls, was published, followed by My Mother and I, We Talk Cat, a memoir of prose and poetry.

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“Tentative, contemplative. If she were a candle, she would want to burn, not merely stand tall and unlit in graceful uselessness, decorative, devotional, and always a promise. She is not a candle. Still, she believes it is time to burst into flame instead of just skimming the edges of importance.”

From Beate Sigriddaughter: “Words are my passion and, with many wise folk before me, I believe that they are a significant tool for building a world of sanity, honor, and peace. I am especially passionate about having women’s voices heard, read, and validated in our off-kilter world.”

Beate Sigriddaughter is the author of several novels, collections of poetry and other writings. Her most recent poetry collections are Wild Flowers (2022), Kaleidoscope (2021), Emily (2020) and Dancing in Santa Fe (2019).

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Award-winning author Charmayne Samuelson has published her 11th book, Mata Ortiz “Poetry of Clay: Poesía del Barro,” a bilingual photo and poetry book showcasing 24 Master Potters of Mata Ortiz, Mexico, and their work. This book has won two 2025 First Place Awards from the Independent Press Awards and also the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. She launched her book in the small village of Mata Ortiz in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, less than 100 miles from the U.S.-Mexico Border and was honored to present her book to Ciudad Juarez Mayor Cruz Pérez Cuéllar, Presidente Municipal de Juárez. She is also the author of the Award-Winning and best-selling biography, SPENCER MacCALLUM Memories-Mystique-Mata Ortiz, of the anthropologist who ‘discovered’ Juan Quezada and jump-started his ceramic career, leading to over 1,000 well-known Mata Ortiz potters today. She previously published a time-travel mystery novel set in New Mexico, and two self-help books on hypnotherapy and meditation, a photography book, Wild Mustangs of the Onaqui Mountains, co-authored with her husband, as well as 4 all-age coloring books. Samuelson and her husband live in Las Cruces, NM. All of her books are available on Amazon.com.

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The poems in This Business of Wisdom suggest a syllabus of the lessons each human faces “as you grow, persistent but clumsy, into your bones.” With sometimes playful, often painted language, the author draws upon nature, music, dreams and current events to illustrate how to gain one’s place in the world. Chaos can be met with patience and perseverance. Despite obstacles, dangers and painful losses, the poet shows us how what we see can be trusted. With this first volume of poetry, Lauren Camp focuses a prismatic lens on the ragged aesthetic of society, and by doing so, constructs an educated view of life.

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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The volatile compounds at the core of Lauren Camp s second book are poems of the coiled environment and tremendous loss. Here, the pious sober day solemnly descends / on undamaged desert. The poet claims every frayed moment, every taut mystery, and delivers these with sound-sense wisdom. Only an artist could show human frailty in this way. The thin line between right and otherwise is a fuse that ignites the author, who finds lyricism in mourning and erotic meaning in music. As she writes, perhaps wryly, perhaps optimistically, either we re standing in disordered light before the disappointment, or it s after. The Dailiness offers precision paired with undeviating attention to all the human senses.

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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In her Dorset Prize-winning new collection, Lauren Camp explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent. One Hundred Hungers tells overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation, evoking her father’s boyhood in Baghdad in the 1940s at a time when tensions began to emerge along ethnic and religious lines. She also draws upon memories of Sabbath dinners in her grandparents’ new home in America to reveal how family culture persists.

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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Turquoise Door, Lauren Camp’s fourth book, introduces readers to the cultural anthropology of Taos, New Mexico in the early 20th century. This collection of poems brings the author’s personal attentions and the contemporary realities of the Southwest into a conversation with the historical forces of East Coast transplant Mabel Dodge Luhan—the early feminist, visionary arts patron, and writer who crusaded to create a utopian society in Taos. The poems engage with Mabel, her fourth husband Tony Lujan, and the many talented individuals who visited them in salons and residencies in her adobe home.

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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Took House is a disquieting book about intimate relationships and what is seen and hidden. In vulnerable poems of obsession, Camp places motivation deep in the background, following instead a chain reaction between pain and pleasure. Took House navigates a landscape of bone and ash, wine and circumstance. Boundaries shift between reality and allegory. The unknown appears and repeats, eerily echoing need. Blame, power and disorder hover, unsettling what we know of love.

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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Award-winning poet Lauren Camp’s sixth collection of poetry.

With the gifts of a visual artist and poet’s attention, AN EYE IN EACH SQUARE confronts our era’s barbed and shifting networks of power and atrocities. Lauren Camp’s sixth collection of poetry offers social critique within an imaginative biography of enigmatic painter Agnes Martin and a treatise on the multiplicities of the natural world. Rendering its landscape in precise imagery and lyrical language, AN EYE IN EACH SQUARE asks the reader to hold the conscience of the world and also to claim what we might need most–the risky and urgent space of comfort found within the artist’s line.

“The paintings and mind of artist Agnes Martin echo through the very structure of these poems. In fact, Martin is the book’s structure. She is a form like a sonnet is a form. … Ekphrasis is no contrivance. It is a cosmology. These poems are ‘slow and persuasive.’ They move like the sea, mirror the stillness of the sky, mapping and refining a deep interiority. Agnes Martin’s visual work is composed of verticals and horizontals, and Camp finds their parallel in poetry’s unit of measure, the line, a line that is a question providing its own answer.”–Diane Seuss

“These poems shine with the crystalline austerity of an Agnes Martin painting, sparkling with precise imagery, crisp word choices, and surprising swerves of syntax. The whole braids personal exploration with a deep appreciation, not only of Martin’s work, but also of her unusual participation in the land around her. These poems, similarly, become a part of the landscape in an alchemical feat that brings the reader into its very heart.”–Cole Swenson

“In AN EYE IN EACH SQUARE, Lauren Camp explores the boundary between seeing the world and watching the seeing of the world by somebody else–in this case, the artist Agnes Martin. It’s difficult to capture making in a medium different from the medium in which the making is happening, but Camp translates the feeling of looking into words and accomplishes thereby a rare thing: She writes poems as full as the things about which she is writing.”–Shane McCrae

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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The poems in WORN SMOOTH BETWEEN DEVOURINGS travel through fears of ecological devastation and national and global tragedy, and map routes away from despair. Worry remains in the background, even in landscapes that still hold time’s beginning. Even in long love. “We are suspended in places / entire and different and home,” Camp writes. These precise, sonically-driven poems investigate a confessed gaze for contentment with the conviction of quiet rebellion. Through repeating distance, multiplying birds and crisscrossing storylines, they offer a testament to land and lack, grief, faith, and endurance.

“An exhilarating tableau, WORN SMOOTH BETWEEN DEVOURINGS is wrought in spectacular language that is precise and a perfect vessel. This book captures the lifeblood of our experiences down to each crucial moment and image. Here is a poet writing with a sensibility forged from the viewpoint of one who sees the world in a way no one else sees it, and showing it to us in poems of immense personal impact. Camp has written, with splendor, a collection grounded in searing images of her world and ours. Here is ‘an album of prayers… standing on the periphery of light’ and at the center of things, singing ‘the inevitable echoes’ of life.”–Saddiq Dzukogi

“‘There are no casual insights,’ writes Lauren Camp in “Lessons from a Temporary North,” and these brilliant poems bear out that truth again and again. Wildly original, dense with beauty and startle and riotously rich language, these poems explore their subjects–fire and climate, connection to the land and to one another– with urgency and empathy, and acknowledge the many ways we can be capsized by crisis and wonder alike. WORN SMOOTH BETWEEN DEVOURINGS is an exhilarating collection.”–Catherine Pierce

“WORN SMOOTH BETWEEN DEVOURINGS occupies a world as tightly wound as an octave-sharp E-string. Our world, that is. But in the midst of the regular, even relentless, calamities and instabilities, Lauren Camp’s poems provide an essential calm, where there is, for example, ‘a stone wall / against a bruised sky, / a red mailbox // and clapboard saturated / with morning rain.’ That’s a beautiful and special place–in the same world on the same earth–where we can believe in the possibilities of love, beauty, and peace.”–Robert Wrigley

Writer and educator Lauren Camp works in the confluence of sound, psychology and language.

New Mexico Poet Laureate Lauren Camp is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023).

She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Her work has been translated into Turkish, Mandarin, Serbian, Arabic, French and Spanish. She teaches for Poetry Out Loud-New Mexico and leads her own community workshops.

She has pivoted from a successful career as a visual artist (1996-2008). Her portrait series, “The Fabric of Jazz,” traveled to museums in ten cities. More artwork can be found in cultural centers, hospitals, museums, U.S. embassies and other organizations around the world. For 15 years, she was a producer and host for Santa Fe Public Radio.

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