Still Life: Poetic Vignettes - Paperback

by Megan Huwa (Author)

Still Life gathers people, creatures, and landscapes in poetic still-life vignettes reminiscent of traditional still-life paintings, which capture the landscape as a memento mori, "a memento of mortality." Through free verse, form, narrative, and prose poems, Megan Huwa recounts her body's decline in 2012 at age twenty-seven due to a rare condition that has ushered her into a life of suffering, uprooting her and her husband from her family's fifth-generation Colorado farm, and stilling them in a condo in Southern California. The four-part collection paints life's mercurial seasons, with underlying redemptive threads. The poetic vignettes serve as a keen act of observance and remembrance, beholding Life, the life to come, and the life all around through the miracle of a broken step, a new cross-section of mercy, the life in another's dance, the overlooked beheld, the wondrous done in secret, the life amid loss, the land resown, and the promised home glorified.

Author Biography

Megan Huwa is a poet, author, and former higher education editor and instructor. A rare health condition keeps her and her husband from living near her family's fifth-generation Colorado farm, so her writing reaches for home, both temporal and eternal, and beholds life amidst suffering. She holds a BA in English from Colorado State University and an MA in English from the University of Northern Colorado.