Over the decades Susan McCaslin’s body of poetry has gravitated to openings where contemplative poetry and social justice kiss. Heart Work explores the non-dual regions of “the educated heart” where heart and mind, feeling and thinking conjoin. Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, and John Keats whirl together in liminal and earthy places where beliefs and concepts open to unknowing and mystery. Her breathtaking union of minimalist, Zen-like poems paired with her husband’s powerful photos in “Cariboo Fires, 2017,” and her sequence on living during the pandemic, “Corona Corona,” offer hope by tying the cosmic to the particular and the everyday.

Susan McCaslin is an award-winning Canadian poet and Faculty Emerita of Douglas College in Westminster, BC where she taught English and Creative Writing for twenty-three years. She is the author of eleven volumes of poetry, including her most recent, The Disarmed Heart (May 2014). Her previous volume of poetry, Demeter Goes Skydiving (2012) was short-listed for the BC Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award) in 2012. Susan has published a volume of essays, Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings (2011) and edited two anthologies on poetry and spiritual practice. In addition, she is on the editorial board of Event: the Douglas College Review and is an editorial assistant for The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion (Harvard Divinity School). Susan is nourished by wilderness and by the world’s global mystics and contemplatives of various spiritual traditions. Freed to be a full-time writer since retiring from teaching, she lives in Fort Langley, British Columbia with her husband. Recently, she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River in British Columbia.

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