Last week we announced the winner of the first annual Homebound Publications Poetry Prize, Gary Whited for his collection Having Listened. Now we are pleased to unveil the cover for this winning collection.
We’ve set September 7th as the release date. The title is now available to pre-order in our bookstore. Order through our bookstore and we’ll ship your book August 20th—a full two weeks early!
It’s only been a month since we declared the chose the winner but the praise is already rolling in.
“The book is called Having Listened, after one of these elegantly simple, tender, attentive poems. It might as well also be called Having Looked, or maybe Having Heard, Having Seen, the task achieved. The animals and birds and other creatures, the human beings too, in their beauty and their managing of their lives, what they accomplish in patterns of flight or birdcall, in drinking water from a water tank, in the rusting of a fence are given, poem after poem, in beautiful quiet rhythms and syntactical managements, such careful and respectful attention, it can bring tears to your eyes.”
—David Ferry, award-winning author
“Gary Whited is that rare philosopher who digs deep enough to strike the wellsprings of poetry. Here we enter a stillness so profound it changes the way we see the world.”
—Dan Veach, Atlanta Review
“What does it mean to listen to stillness, to the wind passing overhead, to horse hooves galloping in a pasture, or even to a barn door that blows slightly open, its hinges creaking? In these carefully crafted and exquisitely meditative poems, what is listened to are the sounds of the prairie ranch of the poet’s childhood, but underneath their Montana landscapes, these poems offer us an ongoing inquiry into the nature of listening, what it asks of us, and what it gives in return. Gary Whited teaches us that deep listening is in effect a prayer, a gathering and focusing of our attention, that sometimes lets us hear the mystery of being whisper back.”
—Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House
“In Having Listened, Gary Whited guides the reader to a time and place that evokes the very essence of his experience growing up on the prairie of Eastern Montana. Through his eloquence and imagery, Whited brings the reader to a deeper understanding of the spiritual beauty and sorrows of that life and thus a deep universal connection to it.”
—James T. Powers, author of Saving the Farm
About the Author: Gary Whited is a poet, philosopher and psychotherapist. He grew up on the plains of eastern Montana, and a strong sense of place pervades his poems, whether that place is the prairie, the city or the inner spaces we inhabit. His poems have appeared in several journals, including Salamander, Plainsongs, The Aurorean, Atlanta Review, and Comstock Rewiew. He is currently working on a new translation of the complete fragments of the 5th century BCE thinker, Parmenides.