Ley lines mark alignments of sacred sites such as ridgetops and ancient megaliths and create pathways between them. This book too marks alignments and creates pathways, but its sacred sites are not monuments, they’re artworks and poems. Its various forms of exchange between writers and artists offer unique access to contemporary art, poetry, and the creative process.
In this unique anthology, working poets respond to questions about their recent books, painters and other artists offer statements about their work, and writers respond to artworks. These offerings and exchanges are juxtaposed so as to speak to one another in a capacious, resonant dialogue. The result is a broad-minded and inclusive poetics, a vision of creative work as a constituent of personal and civic life.
Anyone who nurtures the creative impulse will enjoy Ley Lines and return to it again and again. Writing students, art students, and any reader engaged in artistic practice will find in Ley Lines not a how-to manual or step-by-step instruction but an inexhaustible vein of instructive reflection on imaginative work and the creative life.

H. L. Hix is the author or editor of more than two dozen books. His most recent poetry collection is As Much As, If Not More Than. He lives with the poet Kate Northrop in an 1880s railroad house in the mountain west, and writes in a studio that once was a barn. His website is www.hlhix.com.

H.L. Hix's profile page

In Ley Lines, H. L. Hix assembles an array of contemporary poets and visual artists into a single conversation that is at once deeply philosophical, literary, and often times politically subversive. From dialogues on poetics to meditations on how one continues to create in a country (world) of non-stop war, these elegantly curated triads reverberate with collective insights. Ultimately, this compilation reminds readers how closely the act of creating art—written and visual—is linked to the art of listening.

Glori Simmons, director, Thacher Gallery, University of San Francisco

H. L. Hix’s generative, generous anthology renews the poetics of listening. The dialogues between poets and artists seem to ask, in the words of Brian Teare, what kind of language ‘offers clarity sufficient to pain’? One of the most fascinating questions Hix returns to, with a refreshing and buoyant inter-criticality, is whether language adapts consciousness or perception to it or vice versa. ‘Capacious’ is a word he is fond of, and his wide arc of collaborative inquiry into eternity, war, responsiveness and responsibility delivers an expansive one-pointedness. Hix is an able, engaging curator whose book takes time and enriches it.

Cherry Smyth, poet and curator