wordless brave things

by Aurora Lee Passin

Aurora Lee Passin

Aurora Lee Passin is a disabled, queer, chronically ill gardener, writer and part owner of a small family business. She managed to cultivate a life of poetry despite her background in business and nonprofit management. Her poetry is currently published in a diverse array of online publications. She and her wife call Wheat Ridge, Colorado, home.

praise for wordless brave things

Aurora Lee Passin’s wordless brave things is an apt title in ways both obvious (“brave”) and not – after all, how can a collection of words be “wordless”? But somehow this is, giving language to moments when words are beyond us, capturing thoughts wispy as “a watercolor / or a cloud.” These are poems that go beyond poems, and beneath; these poems “sit soft with the earth.” These poems remind us of our connection to nature, how the world’s “seed silence” is within us, too. In this stunning collection, Passin reminds us how easily everything we have can “flicker...into a bloom of nothing.” More importantly, she also reminds us of possibility, of hope – that no matter what is lost, we can “wake / again.” 

- Melissa Fite Johnson, author of Midlife Abecedarian and Green

In these achingly beautiful poems, Aurora Passin attends to the desire that lives in bodies weighted down by winter, chronic illness, and trauma. The speaker of these formally inventive poems witnesses longing all around her – in a fish that “break[s] the surface/and talk[s] to the air,” a snow-covered poplar that reaches its branches toward the house, a fox bounding up a hill. Even as these poems describe states of paralysis, the longing to connect with all living beings permeates this gorgeous, haunting book.

- Carolina Hotchandani, Perugia Prize-winning author of The Book Eaters