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Book Cover for: Confluence, Geoff Wilkinson

Confluence

Geoff Wilkinson

Geoff Wilkinson's poetry provides new ways to look at ourselves and each other. His main theme is connection: connection to self, loved ones, friends, nature, community, ancestors, and future generations. In these poems you will find moments of beauty, wonder, and grace that are present if only you pause and pay attention. From poems about mourning to the celebration of life in all its forms, Wilkinson work transcends the everyday and explores the depths of all this world has to offer.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Lost Valley Press
  • Publish Date: Apr 15th, 2023
  • Pages: 132
  • Language: English
  • Dimensions: 8.50in - 5.50in - 0.31in - 0.39lb
  • EAN: 9781935874454
  • Categories: American - GeneralSubjects & Themes - General

About the Author

Wilkinson, Geoff: - Geoff Wilkinson is a professor at Boston University School of Social Work, where he teaches community organizing, advocacy, and organizational change. A lifelong activist, he worked as a community organizer and as executive director of two statewide organizations advancing health, housing, and social justice, the Massachusetts Senior Action Council and the Massachusetts Public Health Association. He also served as senior policy advisor to the commissioner and director of policy and planning for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. Wilkinson is a founding board member and treasurer of the National Association of Community Health Workers. He is also a co-founder of two organizations working to promote peace and affordable housing, respectively, in the town where he lives just south of Boston with his wife of over 40 years. They have two married sons and two grandchildren.

Praise for this book

Language, in the hands of a skilled poet, brings possibilities to life-witnessing time, place, happening, memories, emotions, absurdity. The skilled poet draws us into essential moments that take us on journeys we may not have imagined. Geoff Wilkinson is a skilled poet, worth savoring like a great cup of tea! Enjoy!

- Michel Duncan Merle, Artistic Director, Akademia Duncan, Former president of the Worcester County Poetry Association


Geoff has turned urgency in the poetry . . . beautiful images, he takes pieces of the grand universe and turns some into palpable bites of everyday reality. Geoff's interest into the mystery of humanity is without hesitation and weaves for us the intimate connection between human and the cosmic experience. Beautiful work!

- Jean Lozoraitis, D.Ed., Poet, musician, painter, and educator; author of loud cracks/soft whispers; On the longest Road


In these finely crafted, potent poems, Geoff Wilkinson gives us new ways to look at ourselves and each other. The settings range from rural Vermont to the American southwest, from Haiti to Hiroshima, from the cityscapes of Central Massachusetts to Chile under the brutal dictatorship of the 1970s. His main theme is connection: to self, to the beloved, to friends, to nature, to the wider community, to ancestors, and to future generations. His work is informed by a stubborn hope borne of long experience and painful lessons. Wilkinson invites us to look more closely, more intently, and more bravely at ordinary life, and to see the moments of beauty, wonder, and grace that are present there if we pause and pay attention. Yet he also engages with harsher truths. This collection asks us to look squarely at the many forms of violence that surround us, but it does so not through dogmatism but by a quiet, attentive bearing-of-witness to the world in which we live.

- Shanee Stepakoff, MFA, Ph.D., author of Testimony, Winner of the Independent Book Publishers Association 2022 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Poetry