Agnes Vojta
What people are saying
As you explore these poems, you will realize you can trust Agnes Vojta to be your guide. She may lend you her kayak, so you can float an Ozarks river alive with playful otters. Or she will stay with you indoors on a winter day, as you gently turn over the jigsaw pieces of grief. With Vojta by your side, you’ll learn how to listen carefully for the cry of a kingfisher, how to tend to a tool with tenderness, and how to be wary in a landscape that includes sinkholes and caves. By the twilight of her book, you’ll realize that the poet has even tossed you a warm jacket. She has wrapped you in her awareness that our orderly universe—which lets us trace the ellipse of a comet home to its precise star—still allows breathing space for surprise and wonder, for the play of constellations and the random scatter of aster seeds. Vojta’s poetry lives between garden and wild river, between honesty and tenderness, between litany and lyricism. Any day I read one of her poems is a good day!—Amy Wright Vollmar, author of Follow: Poems.
How do you find balance between holding on and floating away? Love Song to Gravity is a much needed refuge in the tender sweaters of seasons and the natural world. Vojta will usher you into the suspended timelessness of nature and grief that are as inseparable as night is to day. Sensuous, rich imagery, and accessible language within these short poems create moments that we immediately enter into, an invitation to let down for a while, enter the simpler reliability of an ordered world. Return. There is order in chaos, gravity will remind you. Remember.
—Valerie A Szarek, Poet, Musician, Shamanic Practitioner. Offerings, Signs of Life, Soar Ready: Medicine Poems for a Changing World
Agnes Vojta’s latest collection, Love Song to Gravity, opens with the following lines: “Follow the current. The trees / bow in reverence, touch / the water like prayers.” This opening invites the reader to enter a holy space rooted in Nature. With meditations on beauty, impermanence, human inconsequentiality, love relationships, and mortality, Vojta finds inspiration in Nature and transports the reader to sublimity. Vojta writes, “As I wipe the last traces of dirt away, I thank the tools for their labor. This is prayer.” These poems ferried me not only through Vojta’s prayers but into my own, giving me a beautiful, moving space in which to dwell.
—Lindsey Royce, author of The Book of John