My debut poetry collection, Accumulated Lessons in Displacement, is now available to order from Wipf and Stock, Bookshop.org, and Amazon (and other vendors)!
This collection takes the reader on a nomadic journey around the globe and into the more mysterious realms of the heart and spirit. These poems explore the joys to be found even in grief, the resilient dignity at the heart of each human being, and the “thin places” where heaven and earth seem to meet. Based on her experiences as a “perpetual pilgrim,” the poet remembers the scents of her hometown in the Himalayas, the spicy tastes of a farm meal in China, a walk with a refugee friend in Sarajevo, and a Muslim gardener wetting his lips from a hose on a hot day during Ramadan. In all this, she probes deeper questions about the telos of life as a created being and how to carry on in life and faith in the midst of unexplainable suffering. In entering into these poems, the reader is invited to draw sustaining strength from moments of beauty and divine grace.
What others are saying. . .
Poring over this collection, I find manifested a familiar equanimity, a deep base note of joy upholding the heart despite the many and serial griefs and other displacements (both internal and external) that human life appears to require of us along the journey. I find—as I attend—that the speaker has previously attended with great devotion to the persons, places, and things that have accompanied both her journey and her many, many remarkable sojourns along the way. Because she has refused to squander her accumulated lessons, the reader is also mentored toward wisdom, grace, and peace.
Scott Cairns, author of Slow Pilgrim: Collected Poems
Hicks invites readers to travel with her from Singapore to Baltimore, from Amman to the Congo. The contemplations here are not mere travel reflections; instead, they explore, as Hicks says, ‘the small balls of hope’ that insist themselves and help us to be present with personal and global suffering. Richly rooted in wisdoms from many traditions, these poems remind us that the paradoxes we all live with are as much gift as burden.
Jennifer Wallace, author of Almost Entirely
Truly written and closely observed, Rachel Hicks’s debut collection crackles with energy and insight. While taking the reader from the Chesapeake Bay to Southwestern China, the true movement in these meticulously rendered poems is ever inward, an interior journey bursting with bright sadness and bitter joy. This is a volume to revisit and savor.
Brian Volck, author of Attending Others
Rachel Hicks, a global nomad, clearly perceives the nuanced natural world, its light and shadow, birdsong and rain, and the unseen world in all its mystery and complexity. This pilgrim is both at home and searching for a home. If you ‘wander unknown,’ may Hicks’s verses serve as an ‘astonishing little altar,’ built by her own gifted and ‘benevolent hand’ to ‘point the way.’
Susan Delaney Spear, author of On Earth…
With sharp imagery, gorgeous language, and hard-fought wisdom, Accumulated Lessons in Displacement is a gift from a truly attentive poet. Through personal narratives and meditations on biblical themes, Rachel Hicks takes readers on a journey of longing and belonging. These poems are a beautiful reminder of what it means to live as faithful pilgrims in a world that is both harrowing and hope-filled: ‘we come to see each scene / as something to inhabit, and we wake // to more than morals, wake to mysteries.’
Whitney Rio-Ross, author of Birthmarks
