12/06/2026
A new title coming soon from Middle Creek Publishing & Audio.
Christine Morro’s Earth My Body is a work of devotional poetics that dissolves the boundary between self and world. The collection operates less as a traditional book of poems and more as a sustained act of attention—an extended lyric meditation in which perception itself becomes a form of prayer. Throughout, Morro positions the body not as an autonomous entity, but as porous, relational, and ultimately indistinguishable from the earth it inhabits.
At the core of the collection is a phenomenology of encounter. The poems do not describe nature so much as enter into it, allowing language to mirror the processes it observes: tidal movement, seasonal drift, lunar cycles, and geologic time. Syntax is frequently open, breath-driven, and fragmentary, enacting the very dissolution of ego the poems seek. This stylistic restraint creates a field of attentiveness where meaning arises not through argument, but through accumulation and resonance.
The book is steeped in eco-spiritual consciousness, drawing on traditions that range from animism and mysticism to Buddhist emptiness (as hinted in references like “ku is sky it is emptiness”) and Western phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty appears explicitly). Morro’s poetics insist that perception is participatory: to witness is to merge. The repeated gestures—kneeling, listening, touching stone, naming birds—become ritual acts that re-enchant the world without sentimentality.
While much of the work dwells in awe and reverence, there are undercurrents of longing, loss, and eros—often intertwined with the natural world. Love appears as both human and elemental, frequently dissolving distinctions between the beloved and the landscape. Grief, too, is reframed as a form of deep attention: “grief is love slowed / almost to stillness.”
Ultimately, Earth My Body is a poetics of re-membering—of returning the human body to its place within a larger, animate cosmos. It asks not to be interpreted so much as inhabited. The poems enact what they propose: that to live well is to listen, to merge, and to praise.
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Here is a short review blurb by me:
"In this luminous and incantatory collection, Christine Morro returns poetry to its oldest function: as a bridge between worlds. Earth My Body dissolves the boundaries between self and landscape, language and silence, matter and spirit. The poems move with tidal rhythm, accumulating meaning through gesture and repetition rather than declaration. Rich with ecological detail and spiritual depth, the work invites readers into a participatory awareness where perception becomes sacred practice. This is not a collection to be rushed—it is one to be inhabited, returned to, and lived alongside. Morro reminds us that the act of noticing—of truly seeing and listening—may be our most urgent and necessary form of love."
—David Anthony Martin, author of The Ground Nest and others
About the Author:
Christine Morro writes poetry as ancient incantation. A shedding of skins, she awaits the lines to reveal themselves. An invitation to live the questions that draw us down to earth ~ on sacrifice, love, loss and reclamation. Listening for beauty to recover what has almost vanished. Each sequence of words arises in the way of a carefully tended fire.
She is the author of In Beauty We Are Made Visible, Way to Blue Mountain, and She Who Sees the World
