Earthsongs: A Field Guide to Prayer is Chloe Hettinger’s first published collection of poetry. This work contains 52 poems written over the course of two years.
The poems within this collection are reflections from working intimately with farmland across the country. They explore a relationship with Earth that has been nurtured by devotional stewardship. Farming, which began for her as merely labor, quickly became a moving vehicle for prayer. It is now, in practice, an embodiment of a growing reverence for the breath of life that moves through the world.
Farming also offered another path for a relationship with physical form: The body as a moving temple. No longer a static object defined by the presence of a gaze, but one made alive by that which it is devoted to.
This collection is a story. One of labor and depletion, respite in the womb of friendship, and an emergence to a new frontier.