The Heart Hungers for Wildness

Diane Glass brings a writer's astute attention to detail and a spiritual director's probing of depth to bring new meaning to everyday experience in her new book of poetry, The Heart Hungers for Wildness. You may resonate with specific life situations-the grief of losing a child, the joy of becoming a grandmother, the difficulty of dealing with illness, or the adventure of exploring the natural world. Most certainly you will identify with the universal themes of change, loss, renewal, and gratitude that arise from her poems. Diane's powerful memoir, This Need to Dance, broke new ground in revealing her life with spina bifida. Her work has been published in the "Des Moines Register," "The Iowan," "Dragonfly Arts Magazine," and in essays in various publications. After a career as a Des Moines Register executive, she served as a spiritual director and teacher at the Des Moines Pastoral Counseling Center. She and her husband Jeff Means and their cat Penelope live in Des Moines. This stirring book is a culmination and celebration of a lifetime of paying attention to what truly matters and endures. In exploring myriad dimensions of our yearnings, loves, and innate wildness, Glass continually lands on language that helps readers better understand their own life passages and possibilities. Along the way, she brings great clarity, compassion, and curiosity to the angles of grief and change, loss and sweetness, and youth and aging of a life in the music and imagery of small moments that tell larger stories. From the soup that has and will save the world to the land that will talk to us if we listen, there is a well of generosity of spirit in these poems to feed the wild hearts of all readers. Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Kansas Poet Laureate Emerita