Stewart S. Warren

Warren’s writing, in keeping with his life experience, resonates with philosophic and mystic disciplines, but maintains a colloquial tone that is honest and accessible. He holds up each moment as viable and holy, exalting its presence and grieving its loss, and in the end suggests its transience and transparency.

Stewart Warren’s Second Light, which in the Diné tradition is one of three stages of sunrise, sparkles with just that kind of illumination. “Like the elm,” he writes, “my heart beats in many places.” In a city diner or on Colfax Avenue, on a canyon road in Norteño or by a waterfall where mountains are “wrapped to the waist in clouds,” his clear-eyed and love-haunted look brings out the life inside of lives to which he says yes, “and yes and yes again.”
      —Bob King, Colorado Poets Center

Stewart S. Warren writes, in his new book of poems, "In whatever direction you face me/ that also will I love."  This ability to capture our consideration in these percipient poems is Stewart's gift to us.  As I read Stewart's poems, I see more of the world than I imagined, and I find more in my life than was there before.
 
      —Art Washburn, author of Shadow-maker

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The Weight of Dusk is a lyrical journey of discovery, love, innocence lost, wisdom glimpsed and wisdom gained in fitful starts and reverses.  These narrative poems may focus on the life of one man and its ordinary triumphs and tragedies, but in them Warren shows how large and universal “one small life” can be.  When you read these poems, you may well find your own life in them, looking back at you.
      —Michael Adams, Award winning poet, author of Broken Hand and member of The Free Radical Railroad

From the first poem to the last little phrase, "The miracle, of course, is that we are here," we are in the good company of poems that are milagros indeed, enviro-personal, and heart-thrown. This work is new to me and welcome aboard my psyche, and, I trust, yours as well.
      —Joan Logghe, author, editor, activist, and Director of Write Action: Writing from the Heart of AIDS

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Shape of a Hill: poetry, prose poetry

"Poetry with intelligence, hard-won wisdom, humor and humanity. Stewart S. Warren's long awaited collection is an invitation to see ourselves 'in the shiny mud,' to lean into one another, to get down on our knees and to enter the house of experience."
      —Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of If You Listen and Insatiable

"Warren is a writer who sees deep into the heart of this world, a writer whose voice bounces off canyon walls and travels along rivers to their desert ends.  One can be sure that the echo of this poet's voice will always come back to the reader with clear, authentic and beautiful tones. It would seem that any moment or encounter is reason enough for Warren to take pen to paper and write heartfelt poems that linger with a reader the way all good art should.  Early in this collection Warren writes 'Everything has become an instrument.'  Perhaps there is no better description of these poems, these poems which echo through mountain ranges, New Mexican villages, the many colored skins of the earth and into flight with birds and then settle so nicely back down to earth with her people and their history.  Warren is a lover of all that the earth contains or lets go and these poems reflect that love."
      —Aaron A. Abeyta, author of Colcha and As Orion Falls

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Eloquent, genuine, evocative of place and community—such are the voices in this collection. Open the cover and you push from the bank, moving with the river's shifting current of poetry, essays, stories, ripples of Spanish overlapping English. Listen for Coyote, pass below polished volcanic cliff rock, and smell the spiced wind off the mesas. Let the songs here sing to you of life lived in appreciation of the unique place that is the Upper Rio Grande.
      —Chris Ransick, Denver Poet Laureate, and author of Lost Songs and Last Chances

The anthology project, conceived by Maria Morales McConnell of Del Norte, Colorado and edited by Arthur Washburn and Stewart S. Warren, is a living document and a deed to the land belonging to those bold enough to live their stories and share them straight.

Included here are poems, essays and flash fiction written by people spanning eighty years in age, over two thousand miles in distance, and a multitude of cultural and class differences, but having one central experience in common—a desire to walk to the river and find other like-hearted human beings gathered there.  This collection, then, is for people who read with their whole body and mind.

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