Ouroboros - Between Then & Now

Ouroboros: Between Then & Now gathers the mostly unpublished poems of Cynthia Trenshaw - a poet whose life was as wide-ranging as her verse. A hospital chaplain, professional guardian, and midwife to the dying, in the 90s Trenshaw also spent five years offering massage therapy and quiet companionship to homeless people on the streets, under the viaducts, and in the shelters of San Francisco. Those years of paying close attention to people most of us overlook run all through this collection.

Written over a lifetime and rooted in nearly forty years on Whidbey Island, Washington, these poems find the miraculous in the ordinary and life's largest questions hiding inside everyday moments. Trenshaw's writing is muscular, direct, and deeply humane - sharp and funny in one breath, tender and searching in the next. Readers have likened her work to listening to jazz, its modulations reaching unexpected corners of language and experience.

Following her acclaimed first poetry collection, Mortal Beings (Finishing Line Press, 2019) - praised by Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshall as "a memorable book" - this volume deepens the themes that define her work. Trenshaw's nonfiction debut, Meeting in the Margins: An Invitation to Encounter Society's Invisible People, won the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award gold medal in the Social Issues category. This posthumous collection reveals the poet beneath the advocate: a wise, curious voice on connection, mortality, spirituality, and what it means to be fully human. Printed in full colour throughout, it is a beautiful rewarding read for anyone drawn to contemplative, finely crafted poetry with a great heart for the times we live in.