Winter Work

Winter Work by Stephen Meadows is a collection of poetry as much as it is a songbook of melodies and prayers to the natural world. An homage to the wind that carries us through experience and emotion, his poems carry his reader through acacias in full bloom, a yard full of bones, a firmament of losses. With visceral details of the elements, he elicits feelings of joy, comfort, and sadness, with encounters of love, romance, death, climate change, and the suffering of Native peoples. A reader may find themselves in meditation with this collection, among the pines, wind, and oaks.
— Georgina Marie, Poet Laureate of Lake County

These poems offer clear, clean witnessing of our beautiful, aching world. Here “in the shadow of the tower” of the California Missions, with death as ongoing companion, Meadows brings us into deep sensory presence, filling us with reverence for each living moment, with grief for each precious, passing being.
— Kitty Costello, author of Upon Waking and cofounder of the Tall Mountain Circle

There is maturity in these poems. Sit down with him in a wild place and listen. He knows.
— Lance Henson, author of Cheyenne Dog Soldier

Stephen Meadow’s latest collection of poems is just that, poems. His work escapes categorization other than that of poetry. You hear the poems from the page; you smell the flowers, wooded places, meadows, and the ancestors he speaks of. You feel the river flow. The poems touch a place where poetry arrives in both strength and beauty. — Linda Noel, Poet Laureate of Ukiah Emerita

Winter Work is the play of a soaring brilliance proving through poetry that all phenomena exist at a crossroads, all spirits are both loved and unnamed. In these poems are some of the greatest feats of wisdom I have ever read. In this book, life is the galaxy of brief settings, and none of its shapes go uninvestigated. And your imagination is left to cherish all of the food of rebellion littered about the very room you sit and read this work in.
— Tongo Eisen-Martin, 8th Poet Laureate of San Francisco

Out of desolation, Stephen Meadows re-centers us on the “bright edge of worlds.” These new poems are a necessary witnessing to the kinds of grief that stalk our continent. Stark lines like “The wind is a butcher / carving up the mesquite,” craft images of genocide, the aftermath of war in veterans’ lives, poverty, despair. Yet without these haunting shadows, the fires of creation could not flare up and burn themselves into our retinas, leaving “a new mark”—an intricate weaving that makes Winter Work a blazing ember of hope in my cupped hands.
— Deborah A. Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir and Altar for Broken Things