Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Poetry

REDUCED TO JOY

Mark Nepo

Poems 2000-2013

Mark Nepo is emerging as one of the truly significant writers and thinkers of today. Nepo has a singular way of distilling great truths down to their essence.

Moreover, during his cancer journey, Nepo relied on the power of expression and the writing process to keep him tethered to life. In Reduced to Joy, Mark Nepo explores the places where pain and joy are stitched to resilience, uncovering them with deep wisdom, poetic passages and personal revelations. Nepo reminds us all of the secret and sacred places within, forgotten in the noise and chatter of our busy distracted 21st Century lives. Reduced to Joy is a lesson in stillness, in standing in the mystery and, above all, in the work of love. Mark Nepo is a poet, philosopher and author of thirteen books including the New York Times bestseller The Book of Awakening. A highly popular workshop leader, Nepo travels internationally. He lives and writes in southwest Michigan.

Available products
Book Published 2013-08-01 by Viva Editions

Comments

Rumi would have described this book of poems as a crystal chandelier -- so many jewels, each like a treasure God has placed in the heart of Mark Nepo. If you already know Mark's work, you won't want to miss this collection. And if you have never had the pleasure of experiencing the world through Mark Nepo's eyes, begin with Reduced to Joy.

Oh! What a marvelous book. Mark Nepo's generous, vast poems restore readers to joy even before we finish reading them — musing upon single lines, images, stanzas — we feel it rising up again, that precious sense of YES. And completing them — we feel the rich trove of thinking and living so heartened and restored.

Mark Nepo's poems in his new book, Reduced to Joy, reduce me first to grateful silence, and then to tears, and then to laughter, and then to praise. He joins a long tradition of truth-seeking, wild-hearted poets--Rumi, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver--and deserves a place in the center of the circle with them.

The soul is so precious, full of joy and wonder, and the pain that comes from love. These poems touch the soul, reminding each of us what it means to be fully alive, to be surrounded by what is sacred. Allow them to reach under your skin, to where mystery is born into meaning.

Reduced to Joy has many different kinds of poems, all of them clear, wise, beautifully put, spare.The ones I like best have small stories in them, like the one of his father's four uproarious Russian unclesaround a pool table in the 1950s. (Running the Table) Mark Nepo has a great heart. His poems are good company.